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THE JOURNAL OF WINSTON CHURCHILLWINTER 2010-11 • NUMBER 149$9.95 / £6.50

Prime Minister? Had the situationsbeen reversed, and Churchill had “gotthere on his own,” I think FDRwould’ve lost Britain. Churchill wouldhave been over in the U.S. poundingthe podium, but with the lack of a parliamentarysystem, he’d have beenstuck out of it. I suppose we should behappy things were the way they were.DEAN KARAYANIS, VIA EMAIL• Them’s fightin’ words to someof our readers, I suspect! But it’s aninteresting speculation. —Ed.THANKS...I treasure my copies from 1991.I’ve always said it’s the best associationmagazine I have ever read—more ajournal that a magazine, a literary andhistorical work, a source of nostalgia.CYRIL MAZANSKY, NEWTON CENTER, MASS.THE “DRUNKEN OFFER”Nicely done on Churchill’s reunificationoffer to de Valera (FH 147:57). David Freeman’s exegesis of theworks of Terry de Valera and DiarmaidFerriter blows their allegations out ofthe water. I do find the PM’s innercircle defensive about his alcohol consumption,and there were others whocommented on his being worse for thewear on occasion. It’s plausible that hewas so exhilarated by the significanceof the Japanese attack that he celebratedwith an extra brandy or two. Sowhat? (Nor would an extra brandy havemade much difference.) His curioussense that Ireland was really “part ofthe family” was consistent, and hisoffer to de Valera was in character.WARREN F. KIMBALL, JOHN ISLAND, N.C.TOYEING AROUNDOn page 56, Richard Toye isquoted as quoting Churchill that theHindus were “protected by their ownpullulation.” I did not know that one.Do you know where it comes from?ANTOINE CAPET, UNIVERSITY OF ROUEN• The more we read of Toye’sopus the more we think we let it offlightly. The quotation is from theColville Diaries in Martin Gilbert’sWinston S. Churchill VI: 1232, whereColville writes of a conversation on 22February 1945:“The PM was rather depressed,thinking of the possibilities of Russiaone day turning against us….He hadbeen struck by the action of theGovernment of India in not removinga ‘Quit India’ sign which had beenplaced in a prominent place inDelhi....He seemed half to admire andhalf to resent this attitude. The PMsaid the Hindus were a foul race ‘protectedby their mere pullulation fromthe doom that is their due’ and hewished Bert Harris [RAF BomberCommand] could send some of hissurplus bombers to destroy them.”Taken in context with Churchill’ssour mood that night, the statement isunextraordinary, and we can believe itwas said (privately of course) with asmirk, since everyone knows Churchillnever wished to wipe out the Hindus.Toye breathlessly quotes it as a kind ofshocking revelation that WSC hatedIndians—which is nonsense. —Ed.FROM OUR PATRONI have been greatly touched byFinest Hour 148 dedicating its cover tome to mark my 88th birthday. Thankyou so much.THE LADY SOAMES LG DBE, LONDONAMBIDEXTROUS?In FH 148: 34, Churchill isholding what appears to be a paintbrush in his left hand. Since he wasright-handed, was he ambidextrous, orwas the picture printed the wrong wayround?RODNEY CROFT, ENGLAND• The picture is not “flopped,”and we asked David Coombs aboutthis when we saw it. We concludedthat either Churchill occasionallytouched something up left-handed, orthat the thing in his left hand was asteadying rod used as a support for hisright hand when painting fine detail,which is sometimes seen in otherphotos of him at the easel. —Ed.CHURCHILL AND HITLERManfred Weidhorn’s remarkableanalysis (FH 148: 26-30) showing theFINEST HOUR 149 / 5numerous similarities of Hitler andChurchill—from being artists to notknowing how to surrender—linkedtogether these shared traits in a way Ihave not seen before. There is oneother similarity: Hitler like Churchillgained high office by democraticprocess. It wasn’t until Hindenburgretired that Nazism took full effect.RICHARD C. GESCHHKE, BRISTOL, CONN.• Professor Weidhorn replies:Good point, though to be precise, theNazis never obtained a majority voteunder the Weimar Republic (themaximum was 43.9% in the March1933 election), while the Conservativesdid. Hitler was head of the party andso automatically projected into power,while Churchill was on the marginsand was only belatedly and grudginglygiven power. There probably are othersimilarities I overlooked. I just tried tohit the big ones, as an exercise in life’sironies. Thank you for your observationand for the kind words.THE SUMMER OF ’41After Hitler invaded Russia,Clementine Churchill sponsored theBritish Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund.Aged 13, I assisted by running a locallending library, carrying a bag of booksaround on my bicycle and lendingthem to neighbours at one penny perweek. Over a few months I lent 504books and was able to contribute twoguineas to the fund.Little did I know that ten yearslater I would be taking the PrimeMinister’s wife out to dinner at a localhostelry in my capacity as chairman ofthe Woodford constituency YoungConservatives. I still have Mrs.Churchill’s letters of thanks.JOHN R. REDFERN, EPPING AND WOODFORDBRANCH, CHURCHILL CENTRE UK ,

T H E M E O F T H E I S S U EThe Value of Intelligence, Then and NowConsidering articles for this issue, I searched—asalways—for a common thread around which tobuild the contents. On the surface, publicationreadyarticles seemed interesting but eclectic: one onYoung Winston and Mark Twain (ergo, our cover); a colorfulexposition of WSC’s travelogue My AfricanJourney; the Churchill Centre-NEH 2010 TeacherInstitute in England; the last of our San Francisco conferencepapers; book review on the alleged Churchill-Mussolini letters. But nothing, it seemed, jelled together.We had a lengthy article by Sir Martin Gilbert,spawned after one of our conversations on “LeadingMyths,” detailing Churchill’s global involvement withWorld War II Intelligence; and what Christopher Sterlingcalled a “technology footnote,” on security methods forwartime phone conversations. Far more important thanhis modest title suggested, this was in fact the beginningof the modern digital age.Intelligence, perhaps? The theme still needed bolstering.Churchill was deeply involved with intelligencelong before World War II.I thought of David Stafford, the great intelligencescholar, author of the best books on the subject, and anold friend. I asked if I might republish his remarks at our1996 Conference on Churchill and intelligence fromWorld War I to Pearl Harbor to 1953 Iran (yes, Iran;fancy that!)—subjects which dovetailed quite nicely withSir Martin’s commentary. And lo, we were on our way.By good fortune arrived a human interest story byMyra Collyer, an 86-year-old ex-WAAF who had helpeddecypher aerial reconnoissance photos with none otherthan Sarah Churchill. It was ideal to “pace” the issue,between the technical articles. Almost there! But Iwanted an article to stitch it together in modern context.What might we learn today by comparing the nearreverencewith which Churchill treated intelligenceinformation—his “Golden Eggs,” he often called it—compared to our modern, lackadaisical approach to it?Why, for example, aren’t more of today’s leaders callingfor “WikiLeaks” to be prosecuted for posting secret documentson the Iraqi and Afghan wars for the wholeworld, including the enemy, to peruse? What wouldChurchill think about that?I asked David Freeman, who has the critical facultyand historical perspective to consider that question. Heduly produced a reminder that Churchill had actuallyfaced something similar. Suddenly we had another“themed” issue of Finest Hour.And then there was the back cover. Imagine mysatisfaction in realizing, as the layout process started, thatDanny Rogers, the gifted artist who portrays “YoungChurchill” on our cover, had also painted Alan Turing,proclaimed a hero by WSC: the Bletchley encryptionexpert who had designed the “bombe” machine whichbroke the German Enigma. Rounding off the theme withTuring on the back cover was as if the ghost of SirWinston were guiding us with an invisible hand.Only in Finest Hour, I suppose, could we expect toread so much on one aspect of Churchill, and the workof such contributors—writers who for forty years havehelped us explore what Sir Martin calls “The Vineyard,”and Lady Soames “The Saga.” This issue is truly thework of the best people in their spheres—which it is myprivilege to refract.Where else could we find such expert and goodscholars as Gilbert, Stafford, Sterling and Freeman, toinform us about Churchill and intelligence? To whomdoes Christopher Schwarz turn to publish his account ofChurchill and Twain? Ronald Cohen, the great bibliographer;Arthur Herman, Pulitzer Prize nominee; SuzanneSigman, our education leader and exemplar; columnistsMcMenamin and Lancaster; artist Daniel Rogers;Patrizio Giangreco, ever ready to help us dismember sillybooks by Italians; senior editors Muller and Courtenay,without whose polish FH would be a lesser product; SirWinston himself, the craftsman whose words resoundregularly in our pages—all are represented.It is overpoweringly satisfying to know that FinestHour has established that no one or two people are indispensableto its role as the Journal of Winston Churchill:the magazine that keeps the tablets. I look at FH and sayto myself that it is kept alive by people who dare tobelieve that Churchill’s inspiration isn’t dead, can’t bepermitted to die—who make sure that they, their childrenand grandchildren have, to plead Churchill’s causeand irradiate his wisdom, this little beacon of faith. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 6

D A T E L I N E SWhether or not he ultimately succeeds,he has established that there is a largeaudience for truth and reason—perhaps a larger one than for theircheaply appealing opposites.—JOHN O’SULLIVAN IN NATIONAL REVIEW¡VIVA CHILE!LONDON,OCTOBER18TH— Baskingin the glory ofthe Chileanmine rescue,Chile’sPresidentSebastian Piñera began a state visit toBritain with a tour of the ChurchillWar Rooms. Sr. Piñera refrained fromrepeating the words “blood, toil, tearsand sweat” from his boyhood hero’s1940 speech, which he had kept at hisside during the miners’ ordeal. But hesat in Churchill’s wooden chair andpulled from a suit pocket a sack containinga lump of rock taken from theSan José mine, from which thirty-threeminers were freed after sixty-nine daysbelow ground. He also offered as a giftto the War Rooms’ director Phil Reed afacsimile of the first, red-lettered notesaying “Estamos bien en el refugio, lostrente-tres” (“We are doing well in ourrefuge, the thirty-three.”) In return,Mr. Reed gave the President a book ofChurchill’s quotations.Overseen by Piñera in a 22-houroperation, at the end of which hehugged each miner as he emerged fromthe emergency chute bored 622 metresunder the Atacama desert, the extraordinaryrescue lifted his poll ratings andChile’s international standing, providingthe ideal springboard for hislong-planned tour of Europe.A billionaire businessman, theHarvard-educated economist hoped hisvisit would underline Chile’s transitionfrom an insular dictatorship to a democraticeconomic power, and attractinvestment. He is also hoping to banishany lingering memories of AugustoPinochet, the last Chilean head of stateto make headlines in the UK duringhis arrest twelve years ago for murderingcivilians during the 1970s.President Piñera gave HM TheQueen and Prime Minister Cameronfragments of the mine in bags bearingthe legend: “In your hands are rocksfrom the depths of the earth and thespirit of thirty-three Chilean miners.”He later brought similar gifts to FrenchPresident Nicolas Sarkozy and GermanChancellor Angela Merkel. But hechose the War Rooms for his first dayin Europe.The 60-year-old, who said he wascurrently re-reading Churchill’s TheSecond World War, was shown theCabinet Room, the Map Room,WSC’s private quarters and theChurchill Museum. He also metChurchill’s granddaughter, CeliaSandys, 67. “Chile,” Piñera said, “hasgiven a good example of the realmeaning of commitment, courage,faith, hope and unity. We did itbecause we were united. We did itbecause we were convinced. We did itbecause we would never leave anyonebehind, which is a good principle forChile and for the world.”—MARTIN HICKMAN IN THE INDEPENDENTSOMERVELL AWARD 2010CHICAGO, OCTOBER 15TH— NevilleBullock’s “Eye-Witness to Potsdam”(Finest Hour 145) was selected by theFH editorial board for the 2010Somervell Award, for the best articleappearing over the past year (numbers#144-47).There were many strong contendersamong those four issues,including Martin Gilbert’s “A Plan ofWar Against the Bolsheviks” andWarren Kimball’s “The Real ‘Dr. Winthe-War.’”But Bullock’s recollection ofhis time at Potsdam impressed ourboard with its insight.“It is always good to hear aworm’s-eye view from an intelligentand observant worm,” wrote senioreditor Paul Courtenay. David Freemanadded: “I found it to contain a gooddeal of strong, impressionable materialthat could be incorporated into my lectures.”Said Terry Reardon: “I liked thearticles on Ed Murrow and HarryHopkins. But I give my vote to thisfirsthand account: informative andhighly entertaining.”The Somervell Award, formerlythe Finest HourJournal Award, wasrenamed at the suggestionof DavidDilks for the Harrowmaster who taughtyoung ChurchillEnglish. PreviousSomervellwinners were: PaulAlkon for the Lawrence of Arabia features,FH 119; Larry Arnn for “NeverDespair,” FH 122; Robert Pilpel for“What Churchill Owed the GreatRepublic,” FH 125; Terry Reardon for“Winston Churchill and MackenzieKing,” FH 130; David Dilks for “TheQueen and Mr. Churchill,” FH 135;Philip and Susan Larson for“Hallmark’s Churchill Connection,”FH 137; and David Jablonsky for “TheChurchill Experience and the BushDoctrine,” FH 141.STALIN CORRESPONDENCEMOSCOW, APRIL 15TH— Russian historianVladimir Pechatnov has received majorfunding from the Russian governmentto support a new annotated edition ofStalin’s correspondence with Rooseveltand Churchill, using archival memosand papers that indicate what Stalinand company were really thinking. Heclaims full access to dig out the kind ofmaterial that Oleg Rzheshevsky producedin an initial way in his War andDiplomacy. Petchatnov is also workingto arrange an English translation. Oneof FH’s contributors had a long talkwith Petchatnov in Moscow about thisproject. It will be helpful to have a newcollection to replace various editions ofthe correspondence compiled withoutaccess and/or references to Russianarchival material.THE YOUTH VOTEWe were asked recently what we’vebeen doing to promote interest inWSC among young people. A trollthrough the past two years of FinestHour and the Chartwell Bulletin providesa list of events and peopleresponsible, though there are more:First Teacher Institute with NEHgrant support, Ashland University,Muller/Lyons/Sigman, 2007.Churchill in Advance PlacementFINEST HOUR 149 / 8

History, Bob Pettengill, CB 17.Churchill’s Scotland Tour atDundee University, CB 17.Peacock College Students re-erectfirst Churchill Statue, CB17.Education Programs atVanderbilt University, Chicago, Seattleand Atlanta, CB 17.Churchill, Achievement andLiberty, by Bill Clinton & George W.Bush, FH 140.Baylor University StudentSeminar, Kimball/Muller, CB 17.William & Mary StudentSeminar, Sigman/Muller, CB 17.Changing Views of WSC since1968, by twenty authors, FH 140.Second NEH-TCC TeacherInstitute, Cambridge and London,Muller/Sigman, CB 18.Churchill and Family, by MarySoames, FH 140.Churchill and Statesmanship,Pittsburgh Teacher Seminar, SuzanneSigman, CB 19.Thought and Action in the Lifeof WSC, San Diego Seminar,Muller/Kambestad, CB 19.Churchill for Today, 2009Conference, Myers/Kambestad, CB 19.Finest Hour Online, by JustinLyons, FH 143.Young Winston’s WritingsShaped a Hero, by undergraduateAllison Hay, FH 143.Hillsdale College H.S. TeacherSeminar, Bob Pettengill, CB 20.Graduate Seminar at Chicago,Muller/Rahe, CB 20.Williams College LeadershipProgram, Warren Kimball, CB 20.High School Seminars inArizona, Massachusetts, Michigan andChicago, Suzanne Sigman, CB 20.Interviews with Churchill aged31 and 35, by Bram Stoker andHerbert Vivien, FH 144.What I Admire about Churchill,by student Timon Ferguson, CB 21.Going Live with the NewWebsite, John Olsen, CB 21.Placing Churchill in Classroomsand Curricula, Suzanne Sigman, CB 21.Churchill’s Futurist Essays andChurchill for Today, FH 146.Churchill College, Illinois, Phil &Susan Larson, FH 146. >>AROUND & ABOUTThe Wall Street Journal observed on September17th that proposals for the U.S. government to punishChina for its overvalued yuan with protective tariffs arebad policy: “…pegging the yuan to the dollar is not ‘currencymanipulation’ or ‘stealing American jobs’…China’s real sin is sterilization,which insulates its domestic economy from the money-creating effect of acurrency board.”Quoting Milton Friedman’s A Monetary History of the United States,the Journal says that in 1921-29, “when the world used gold instead ofdollars for monetary reserves, the [U.S.] gold stock grew by about 50%,reflecting its trade surplus. [But] from 1923 on, a policy of sterilizationcaused the level of high-powered money to remain stable, and wholesaleprices fell 8% from 1925-29. This short-circuited the self-correcting mechanisminherent in the gold standard, which is akin to a universal currencyboard when all currencies are pegged to gold. The U.S. should have seenan increase in the money supply, causing higher prices and over the longterm tending to restore trade balances.“Instead the Federal Reserve wreaked havoc on countries trying tostay on or rejoin the gold standard, especially Britain, which was hemorrhaginggold. It was forced into a period of deflation and couldn’t competewith the American export juggernaut. London responded with protectionismin the form of Imperial Preference, which contributed to the GreatDepression, and the gold standard system collapsed.”The reader who sent us this cutting added: “It’s too bad no one understandsthis except the Wall Street Journal. When Churchill decided tosupport Imperial Preference in the late 1920s, he was not abandoning FreeTrade, but reacting to U.S. monetary policy, desperate to defend Britainagainst the Fed.”The editor is very muddy where economic theory is concerned, butthis seems to make some sense. Though Churchill said his decisions asChancellor of the Exchequer only mirrored recommendations of the Bank ofEngland, the Bank at that time was as pro-gold as the late Dr. Friedman.We would welcome an article from a qualified reader who can explain allthis to us “on one sheet of paper.” Or, say, 1500 words.kkkkkTed R. Bromund in Commentary magazine, 27 August: “On FoxNews Sunday, a slightly incredulous Chris Wallace asked former IllinoisGovernor Rod Blagojevich if he were serious when he compared himself toWinston Churchill in his ability to come back from political oblivion.Blagojevich replied: “You’re right, I’m not serious. I don’t smoke cigars ordrink scotch, and I think I can run faster than him.”Bromund, who quoted Churchill’s reply to teetotaler Field Marshal SirBernard Montgomery (“I drink and smoke and am 200% fit”), went on torecall Churchill’s note to his War Secretary in 1941 (published in The GrandAlliance): “Is it really true that a seven-mile cross-country run is enforcedupon all in this division, from generals to privates?....A colonel or a generalought not to exhaust himself in trying to compete with young boys runningacross country seven miles at a time….Who is the general of this division,and does he run the seven miles himself? If so, he may be more useful forfootball than war. Could Napoleon have run seven miles across country atAusterlitz? Perhaps it was the other fellow he made run. In my experiencebased on many years’ observation, officers with high athletic qualificationsare not usually successful in the higher ranks.” Perhaps, Bromund adds,“Churchill’s maxim also applies to governors.” Well done, Mr. Bromund. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 9

D A T E L I N E SVancouver student speakersTimon Ferguson/Kieran Wilson, CB 23.Young Winston on Afghanistan,Then and Now, FH 147.How Bad a Student Was YoungChurchill?, CB 24.Students’ Choice, Best RecentChurchill Books, John Rossi, FH 148.Googleworld: New Generationsand the Concept of Joining, FH 148.Third Teacher Institute,Sigman/Muller, Summer 2010 (p. 45).ERRATA, FH 148Page 4: The letter on “...Prayersand the Lash was from James Mack inOhio, not Don Abrams—sorry.Page 7: Sidney Allinson remindsus that the Duke of Hamilton did notpersonally arrest Rudolf Hess, who washeld by ploughman David Maclean forthe Home Guard. The Duke interviewedHess, confirmed his identityand spoke to Churchill; one source sayshe was “summoned to Ditchley.” TheDuke was appalled at the thought thathis loyalty might be questioned.USS CHURCHILL RESCUEADEN, SEPTEMBER27TH— At leastthirteen Africanmigrants weredead after a U.S.Navy rescuemission in theGulf of Adenwent awry. USSWinston S.Finest Hour 110Churchill wascoming to the aid of eighty-five peopleadrift in an overcrowded motor skiff inthe busy shipping lanes between thecoasts of Yemen and Somalia. The boatwas initially discovered by a Koreanvessel, which passed its location to theChurchill, whose crew members wentto the skiff and tried to repair brokenengines but were unsuccessful. Thecrew then began towing it out of thesea lanes toward the coast of Somalia.As the crew of the Churchill attemptedto provide them with food and water,the passengers rushed to one side of thevessel, which capsized, throwing all ofthem into the water. Sailors from theChurchill rescued sixty-one.The Gulf of Aden is an importantshipping route between theMediterranean and the Indian Ocean.Somali pirates have lately hijackedseveral cargo vessels. In addition, theUnited Nations estimates 74,000Ethiopians and Somalis fled to Yemenas refugees in 2009. Most cross theGulf of Aden in overcrowded vesselsrun by smugglers. —NBC NEWSBUTTERFLIES RETURNCHARTWELL, KENT, AUGUST 19TH— The butterflyhouse where Sir Winston wouldindulge his passion for breeding rareinsects has been rebuilt. As a youth,WSC was an avid lepidopterist, collectingand pinning specimens fromthen-teeming fields around Harrow. Hereturned to the hobby periodically,with travels through South Africa,India and Cuba. At Chartwell, newbreeding cages allow visitors to experiencehis butterfly garden with itsinsect-friendly lavender borders andbuddleia jungles, just as WSC enjoyedthem in the Forties and Fifties.Matthew Oates, the NationalTrust conservation adviser, saidChurchill contacted L. Hugh Newman,a towering figure in the butterflyworld, in 1939 after Newman movedto within five miles of Chartwell.Newman persuaded an eager Churchillto reintroduce species such as theblack-veined white and European swallowtail,and to convert the under-usedsummer house. Sadly, the attempt wasnot a success, Oates said: “He startedoff with a plan to breed species whichwere native to southern England butthen overreached himself with theseattempts, which ended in rather spectacularfailure.”Since Churchill’s death, half adozen butterfly species have disappearedfrom the Weald of Kent andpopulations of survivors have morethan halved in number. The newbreeding attempts, concentrating oncommon species, will not restoredepleted populations, ravaged by consumptionof habitats for farming andbuilding. Instead they are intended togive a more authentic history experiencefor visitors to Chartwell.More serious conservation workFINEST HOUR 149 / 10is takingplace amidthe swathesof grasslandin thegrounds,which arebeing leftButterfly Walk, Chartwellunmownthrough the growing season in anattempt to stimulate insect numbers.This is what the great man wouldhave wanted, said Mr. Oates. “I wouldargue very strongly that Churchill wasa pioneer wildlife gardener, and viewhim as a bit of a champion of wildlifeand butterflies.” Nigel Guest of the CCChartwell Branch, and a volunteer atChartwell, writes: “I can confirm thatthe revitalised butterfly house is a terrificinnovation and attraction. Lastyear was a superb year for butterfliesand negotiating the butterfly walk wasdifficult because there were so many ofthese beautiful creatures adorning theplants and the ground.”Churchill’s FavouritesPeacock: This feature of summergardenscamouflagesitself againsttree trunksand can facedown predatorssuch asmice by hissing and flashing thestriking “eyes” found on its hindwings.Small Tortoiseshell: hundreds oftortoiseshellsadded colourto gardenparties atChartwell.They havedeclined in recent years, possiblyaffected by a parasitic fly which thrivesin warmer, wetter conditions.European swallowtail: A raremigrant fromthe continent,it is related toBritain’slargest, rarestbutterfly.Churchillfailed to breed these at Chartwell.

Painted Lady: A North Africanvisitor whichmakes a latesummermigration toBritain whenits numbersbecome unsustainable in native habitat.Black-veined White: A largewhitespeciesrecordedin the17thcentury,it disappearedin Britain around 1925,probably a victim of disease or predation.Churchill’s efforts to establish itat Chartwell failed.—JONATHAN BROWN, THE INDEPENDENTRepublished by kind permission; full article isat http:// xrl.us/bh5vi9. Photos by Etoile andKathyscola on Flickr and the Scottish RockGarden Club (www.srgc.org.uk).See also Hugh Newman, “Butterflies toChartwell” (FH 89: 34-39); and RonaldGolding, “Guarding Greatness,” (FH 143:32), where bodyguard Golding recalls howChurchill responded to Newman when hebecame a little too patronizing.GARTER CEREMONY 2010WINDSOR, JUNE 14TH— In 1348 King EdwardIII created the Most Noble Orderof the Garter; in addition to TheQueen and other royal persons, thecomplement is restricted to twenty-fourmembers, who are termed KnightsCompanion (KG) and Ladies Companion(LG). Chosen personally by TheQueen, they are among the most eminentpeople in the United Kingdomand other Commonwealth countries ofwhich she is also Queen.Since 1348, 1002 membershave been appointed, notablySir Winston Churchillin 1953; his daughter, LadySoames, was admitted in2005.There is a romanticlegend about the Order’sorigin: at a court ball, theCountess of Salisbury’sgarter slipped to the floor and theKing, retrieving it, wrapped it roundhis own leg; as onlookers sniggered,the King said, “Honi soit qui mal ypense” (Shame on him who thinks evilof it). This became, and remains, themotto of the Order of the Garter. Butthe more likely explanation is that theGarter is a badge of unity and concord,possibly representing a sword-belt.Each June, Knights and Ladies ofthe Order of the Garter accompanyThe Queen to St. George’s Chapel atWindsor Castle for their annualservice. A magnificent procession isformed, led by the Military Knights ofWindsor, and the officers of theCollege of Arms (kings-of-arms, heraldsand pursuivants), with the Knights andLadies of the Order ofthe Garter followingthem. The Queen’sBodyguard of theHonourable Corps ofGentlemen at Armsand The Queen’sBodyguard of theYeomen of the Guardare also on duty.This year LadySoames invited mywife and me to bepresent in St. George’sChapel. We had asplendid front-rowview of the panoply ofstate as it made itsway into the chapelFinest Hour 129and—at the end—out again.Although the spectacle wasunforgettable, the purpose ofthe event could not be overlooked.It was a religiousobservance, in which theKnights and Ladies of theOrder of the Garter heldtheir annual service ofthanksgiving. I can do nobetter than record one of theAnglican prayers:“Almighty God, in whose sight athousand years are but as yesterday: Wegive thee most humble and heartythanks for that thou didst put into theheart of thy servant, King Edward, tofound this order of Christian chivalry,and hast preserved and prospered itthrough centuries until this day. Andwe pray that, rejoicing in thy goodness,we may bear our part with those illustriousCompanions who have witnessedto thy truth and upheld thine honour;through the grace of our Lord JesusChrist, himself the source and patternof true chivalry; who with thee and theHoly Spirit liveth and reigneth, everone God, world without end. Amen.”—PAUL H. COURTENAY ,Lady Soames between Sir John Major(former Prime Minister) and LordBingham of Cornhill (former Lord ChiefJustice) in an earlier year.Right: Shortly afterpublishing“Googleworld” lastissue, we read thiscounterattack by themagazine industry.We hope they’re right.FINEST HOUR 149 / 11

C H U R C H I L L A N D I N T E L L I G E N C EAdventures in Shadowland, 1909-1953Churchill valued secret intelligence more than any other politician of his century.Without him, the modern intelligence community might never have developed as it did.D A V I DS T A F F O R DCÓNSUL BRITÁNCO MADRIDPHILLIPE HALSMAN, 1950CHANCE ENCOUNTER of a cryptic1949 telegram from Alan Hillgarth inSpain to Churchill in London led to apreviously unknown, privateintelligence mission conducted byChurchill while out of office: keepingtrack of Soviet spies in Europe.In early 1995, after a week’s intensive work in theChurchill Archives at Cambridge, researching my bookChurchill and Secret Service, I opened yet another file ofdocuments. I had reached that dangerous stage, rarelyadmitted by historians, of secretly hoping it would containnothing that demanded more tedious note-taking.It was marked “Private correspondence, 1949.” Thiswas promising for my unworthy hopes. After his triumphsin the Second World War, everyone wrote to Churchill, agreat deal of it inconsequential. With luck I might finishthis file quickly.Speeding through a bizarre miscellany of invitations tolectures, garden fetes, school prize-givings, even the blessingof babies, I came upon a telegram from Spain. It wasaddressed to Churchill at his London home at 28 HydePark Gate. There were only four lines. This is what it said:MESSAGE RECEIVED VERY LATE AS WAS TRAVELLINGAPOLOGIES STOP NUMBERS INCLUDING MINOR PARTS ANDATTACHMENTS IN BOTH CASES ARE NOW TWO HUNDRED ANDTHIRTY SIX THEIRS AND ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN OURSWhat did it signify? Crates of sherry consumed bySpanish and British Cabinet members? Comparative advantagesof rival cigar-rolling devices? My eye was suddenlycaught by the name of the sender: Alan Hillgarth.I instantly knew that I had stumbled on someunknown episode in Churchill’s adventures with the secret____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Dr. Stafford, of Victoria, B.C., was for many years project director at Edinburgh University’s Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars andLeverhulme Emeritus Professor in the University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology. A preeminent intelligence scholar, his books includeCamp X: Canada’s School for Secret Agents, 1941-1945 (1986); The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies (1988); Spy Wars: Espionageand Canada, with J.L. Granatstein (1990); Churchill and Secret Service (1998, reviewed FH 96); and Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (2000,reviewed FH 110). His latest book is Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II (2007, reviewed FH 139). This article is excerptedfrom his paper, “Churchill and the Secret Wars,” 13th International Churchill Conference, Ashdown Park, East Sussex, England, October 1996.FINEST HOUR 149 / 12

world. I recognised Hillgarth’s name from my book aboutthe top secret agency Churchill created in 1940 to “setEurope ablaze” with the fires of sabotage and subversion,the Special Operations Executive (SOE).Hillgarth was just the sort of maverick adventurer towhom Churchill was magnetically drawn. Wounded as a16-year-old Royal Navy midshipman at the Dardanelles, hehad, he hinted, smuggled guns during the 1920s Riff rebellion—whentribal insurgents in Spanish Morocco dealtSpain one of the most severe reverses ever sustained by aEuropean colonising power at the hands of natives. LaterHillgarth went broke sinking a gold mine in Bolivia, andwrote a rollicking cloak and dagger novel of adventure andintrigue which even caught the eye of Graham Greene.The Spanish Civil War found him as British Vice-Consul in Majorca. By 1940 he was in Madrid for thatanxious period when Churchill feared that neutral Spainunder General Franco might join forces with Hitler.Nominally the British naval attaché, in reality Hillgarthhelped supervise Britain’s secret intelligence, sabotage, andsubversion operations in Spain.Churchill, who had met Hillgarth in Majorca in the1930s, regarded him with particular trust, interviewing himpersonally in London and circulating his reports to the WarCabinet. He also employed him on at least one particularlysensitive mission. In September 1941, Hillgarth visitedChequers to discuss ways of keeping Spain out of the war.As a result Churchill stage-managed the unblocking of $10million secreted in a Swiss Bank account in New York.Shortly afterwards the “Knights of Saint-George,” otherwiseknown as British gold sovereigns, were riding to war, liningthe pockets of Spanish generals willing to argue the neutralitycase with General Franco. Hillgarth, like Churchill,had had “a good war.” Ian Fleming, a close friend, calledhim “a useful petard and a valuable war winner.”But what was Hillgarth doing sending a telegram toChurchill in 1949?In fact, the telegram’s mysterious figures referred tothe number of intelligence officers, British and Soviet, inMoscow and London respectively. During this period, theCold War in Europe was becoming glacial. In 1945 IgorGouzenko, a junior cypher clerk, had walked out of theSoviet mission in Ottawa a month after Hiroshima andNagasaki, carrying beneath his coat documents that exposeda massive Soviet intelligence offensive against the West. Sixmonths later Churchill had delivered his “Iron Curtain”speech in Fulton, Missouri. In 1948 Prague fell to theCommunists and the Russians imposed their blockade ofBerlin. Churchill, in opposition since 1945, was anxious toexpose Soviet and Communist misdemeanours and calledfor vigilance against Moscow’s spies and Fifth Columnsaround the globe.In 1949 Hillgarth was retired and living in Ireland.But he travelled, and kept valuable contacts with old intelligenceand military friends in London. Even while out ofoffice, Churchill relied on private information to keep himinformed...right up to October 1951, when WSC returnedto Downing Street.Throughout his life Churchill relished the hands-oncontact with agents normally reserved to case officers.The Second World War—as my book demonstrated—is littered with examples of Churchill listening spellboundto the exploits of heroic young agents returned from behindenemy lines. Hillgarth was part of a long tradition.Sir Martin Gilbert’s official biography has revealed indetail how in the 1930s, a voice crying in the wildernessagainst the threat of Hitler, Churchill turned Chartwell intoa massive private intelligence centre. His best knowninformant was Desmond Morton, an officer in the SpecialIntelligence Service and head of the Industrial IntelligenceCentre. Morton became the Prime Minister’s official adviseron intelligence during the Second World War. Yet his namenever once appears in the Chartwell visitors book. Indeed itseems extraordinary that while still in opposition, Churchillcould calmly invite an SIS officer to Chartwell to chatabout intimate secrets of state over lunch.Only within the last two decades or so has it becomepossible for scholars to write intelligence history. And as theshadows have lifted, we can see with increasing clarity >>“Even while out of office, Churchill relied on private sources ofinformation to keep him informed....Sir Martin Gilbert’s officialbiography has revealed in detail how in the 1930s, a voice crying in thewilderness against the threat of Hitler, Churchill turned Chartwell into amassive private intelligence centre. [We are] littered with examples ofChurchill listening spellbound to the exploits of heroic young agents....”FINEST HOUR 149 / 13

CHURCHILL AND INTELLIGENCE...that Churchill enjoyed lifelong contacts with the secretworld that go back well before the First World War. It isclear that he valued secret intelligence more than any otherBritish politician of this century. Without Churchill, themodern intelligence community might never have taken theshape it did.World War ILet us briefly go back to the decade when Europe wasapproaching the fateful guns of August 1914. Behind thearms race raged bitter intelligence battles. Each Great Powerspied on its rivals and protected its secrets. Late as usual,Britain joined this continental game in 1909, when theCommittee of Imperial Defence approved the creation of aSecret Service Bureau. By the outbreak of war it consisted ofthe two branches that still exist today: MI5 for counterespionageand MI6—otherwise known as the SecretIntelligence Service or SIS—for foreign intelligence. Notsurprisingly, both MI5 and MI6 focussed on naval affairs.The former sent spy-catchers to sniff out German spiesnosing around naval installations in Britain. The latter sentagents to uncover the Kaiser’s naval plans. Both, being newand untried, had difficulty in gaining the ears of ministers.Churchill was the outstanding exception.It was natural that as First Lord of the Admiralty from1911 to 1915 he should be interested, as he hints in TheWorld Crisis. What he carefully concealed was the provenance,the intensity, and the significance of his influence onthe infant secret service. Richard Burdon Haldane, Secretaryof State for War in the pre-war Liberal Government, chairedthe 1909 committee that recommended its creation. TheDirector of Military Intelligence was a fellow Scot,Lieutenant-Colonel John Spencer Ewart, a veteran ofOmdurman. In November 1909, just weeks after the SecretService Bureau began its work, Haldane asked Ewart to goand talk to the young man concerned—the President of theBoard of Trade, Winston Churchill.The meeting took place on 15 November 1909 inChurchill’s private office, the bronze bust of Napoleon thathe carried with him from ministry to ministry carefullypositioned on the desk between them. It sparked a lifelonglove affair between Churchill and the Secret Service. He wasdeeply alarmed by what he had witnessed in Germany.Intrigued by Ewart’s mission, within weeks Churchill hadsent him a sixty-page memorandum packed with Board ofTrade data about German commerce.From then on, Churchill saw the Secret Service as vitalto national security. As Home Secretary, he eagerly promotedMI5 demands for greater surveillance powers: itslegendary registry of spies and potential subversives—whathas been described as “the most important and controversialweapon in the British counter-intelligence armoury.” It wasChurchill who first authorised the clandestine interceptionof private mail by general warrants; and who conceived thelegislative sleight of hand by which the drastic third OfficialSecrets Act was slipped through Parliament in 1911.In 1994 Stella Rimington, then Director-General ofMI5, visited Edinburgh. I was able to engineer a few wordswith her. “Ah yes, Churchill,” she said briskly when I toldher of my book. “He opened all the doors when my predecessormade his first nationwide tour in 1911.”As Europe slid towards war Churchill kept in constanttouch with the man she meant: Sir Vernon Kell, the firstdirector of MI5. By the end of July 1914 he was livinground the clock in his office, surrounded by telephones. Itwas on one of these that, late on August 3rd, Churchill rangand ordered him to take the preemptive action the two hadlong been planning. The next day, as war officially began,suspected German spies on Vernon Kell’s secret list werearrested in a nationwide swoop by the Special Branch.Kell is not the only important intelligence player ofthis period in Churchill’s life. Sir Alfred Ewing, Director ofNaval Education, yet another Scot, was a short, thick-setman with keen blue eyes and ill-kempt shaggy eyebrows.His first wife was a great-great grandniece of GeorgeWashington. On the day war began, he turned up inChurchill’s office with Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, theDirector of Naval Intelligence, also a Scot—a taciturn figureof such silent discretion that he was known throughout theNavy as “Dummy” Oliver. They wanted to interceptGerman navy radio signals.Churchill immediately agreed and put Ewing incharge. By November, hidden deep within the Admiralty, acode breaking agency known as Room 40 had begun itswork. Three years later its greatest coup came with thedecyphering of the Zimmerman telegram that so memorablyhelped bring the United States into the war.Room 40 was the progenitor of World War II’sBletchley Park and of Britain’s present-day GovernmentCommunications Headquarters (GCHQ), that greatvacuum cleaner in the sky that works in tandem with theAmerican National Security Agency and other allies tosweep up signals intelligence from around the globe.Churchill was fascinated by Room 40’s work. He personallywrote out in longhand its founding charter andspent many an hour watching the codebreakers at theirwork. He captured the thrill in The World Crisis:...in Whitehall only the clock ticks and quiet men enter withquick steps laying slips of pencilled paper before other menequally silent who draw lines and scribble calculations andpoint with the finger or make brief subdued comments.Telegram succeeds telegram...as they are picked up anddecoded...and out of these a picture always flickering andchanging rises in the mind and imagination...Thus the statesman who so valued his secret intercepts inthe Second World War that he described them as hisFINEST HOUR 149 / 14

They Owed Churchill—and He Owed Most of Them...DESMOND MORTON (1891-1971)joined the SIS in 1919 and headedthe Industrial Intelligence Centre,Committee of Imperial Defence, 1929-39. Living close to Chartwell, it was asimple matter to walk over and briefChurchill with crucial intelligence onthe rearmament of Germany. Hisname never appeared in theChartwell Visitors Book.JOHN SPENCER EWART (1861-1920), War Office Director of MilitaryOperations, was sent by Haldane tobrief Churchill, then President of theBoard of Trade, on the the new SecretService Bureau. Captivated by thepotential value of the concept,Churchill furnished Ewart with a 60-page report on German commerce.ALFRED EWING (1855-1935), a short,thick-set Scot with ill-kempt shaggy eyebrows,was put in charge by WinstonChurchill of the World War I codebreakingagency known as Room 40. Itwas the predecessor to World War II’sBletchley Park and today’s GovernmentCommunications Headquarters (GCHQ),which shares intelligence with the U.S.National Security AgencyRICHARD BURDON HALDANE(1856-1928), Secretary of State forWar, 1905-12, chaired the committeethat recommended the creation of aBritish Secret Service Bureau. Itquickly evolved into two branches thatstill exist today: MI5 for counter-intelligenceand MI6 (Secret IntelligenceService) for foreign intelligence.SIR VERNON KELL (1873-1942),founder and first Director General ofMI5. On 3 August 1914, Churchill rangKell to signal the action they had longcontemplated: a nationwide round-upof suspected German spies by theSpecial Branch. As Prime Minister inJune 1940, Churchill removed theailing Kell shortly before his death.STELLA RIMINTON (1935-), John Major’shighly visible Director General of MI5, 1992-96. She famously opposed national ID cardsand described the American response to the9/11 attacks as a "huge overreaction.” Latershe warned that Prime Minister GordonBrown should be “recognising risks, ratherthan frightening people in order to be able topass laws which restrict civil liberties, preciselyone of the objects of terrorism: thatwe live in fear and under a police state.”“golden eggs” was the very person who in 1914 had made itall possible.Britain’s SIGINT agency, along with MI5 and MI6, isthe third of Britain’s intelligence services. Like them, itshistory is firmly imprinted with the Churchill stamp. Itshows that when he kept his assignment with destiny in1940, he was already a veteran of intelligence wars—andI’m passing over, of course, those personal encounters withthe “Great Game” he’d experienced as soldier-journalist onthe North-West frontier of India, in the Sudan, in Cuba,and in South Africa, all of which had made him an ardententhusiast of the shadow war.Intelligence is power: the better, the more effective.Churchill, politician that he was, instinctively knew it. Itgave him a weapon of multiple uses. He could deploy itagainst the enemy, as he did so brilliantly in both WorldWars, but it also helped in struggles with friends and allies.One reason he liked “Ultra” was that it put him on an equalfooting with his Chiefs of Staff and gave him a weapon towield against reluctant or recalcitrant Generals. But it wasalso a powerful tool in dealings with allies as well.Roosevelt and Pearl HarborOn Sunday evening, 7 December 1941, Churchill wasdining at Chequers with the American ambassador, John G.Winant, and Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s special envoy toMoscow. Shortly after nine o’clock he switched on his wireless,and barely caught an item announcing a Japaneseattack on the Americans. Within minutes he was talking toFranklin Roosevelt on the transatlantic line. The Presidenttold him of the assault on Pearl Harbor and his intention toseek a Congressional declaration of war on Japan.At first stunned by the momentous news, Churchillfinally grasped its import. Anticipating Germany’s declarationof war on the United States, he concluded that Hitler’sfate was sealed and the war was won. “I went to bed,” herecalled, “and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” >>“Intelligence is power: the better, themore effective. Churchill, politicianthat he was, instinctively knew it....He could deploy it against theenemy, as he did so brilliantlyin both World Wars,but it also helped in struggleswith friends and allies.”FINEST HOUR 149 / 15

CHURCHILL AND INTELLIGENCE...But did he also dream contentedly of a conspiracycome to fruition? Claims quickly surfaced in the UnitedStates that Roosevelt had deliberately withheld intelligenceof the coming attack in order to silence the isolationists andbring the United States into the war.More recently, voices have suggested that the real PearlHarbor intelligence conspirator was not Roosevelt butChurchill. According to this claim, Churchill’s astonishedreaction at Chequers was nothing but a carefully constructedcharade that masked the secret of advancedintelligence about Pearl Harbor that he deliberately concealedin order to lure Roosevelt into war. This, argued twoauthors in 1991, one a former wartime codebreaker in theFar East, was the true “betrayal at Pearl Harbor.”Central to this startling conspiracy theory is the claimthat prior to the Japanese strike on Hawaii, British andAmerican codebreakers had broken not only Magic, theJapanese diplomatic cypher, but also the Japanese Navy’soperational cypher, JN-25. The American decrypts had notbeen sent to the White House, according to the conspiracytheorists, but the British ones did reach Churchill and forewarnedhim of the attack. In short, this theory not onlyplaces Churchill at the heart of an intelligence conspiracy. Itsimultaneously turns Roosevelt into an ignorant dupe.But the theory is fatally flawed. The reason is not thatChurchill was incapable of manipulating intelligence tomaximise the chances of American participation. He hadalready done so in 1940-41, withholding Ultra intelligencerevealing German postponement of its invasion plans tokeep up pressure on Roosevelt. There are two more cogentreasons. First, the betrayal theory flies in the face ofChurchill’s own patent desire to win American help. Whywould he deliberately have connived at the destruction ofthe U.S. Pacific Fleet? One reason he desired Americanentry was to protect British Far East interests. It would havemade far more sense, had he possessed advanced intelligence,to have passed it on to the White House. He wouldthus have saved the U.S. fleet and earned Roosevelt’s gratitudein a war that would in any case still have occurred.In fact—the heart of the matter—Churchill did nothave advance intelligence about Pearl Harbor. The authors’contention about JN-25 is simply wrong. It is true thatBritish Far East codebreakers had broken the cypher beforePearl Harbor, perhaps as early as 1939. But what the conspiracytheorists omit to note is that JN-25 was supersededby an improved system, JN-25B, in December 1940, andthen again in 1941 by two more successive changes,JN-25B7 and JN-25B8. These new cyphers for all practicalpurposes were unreadable and unproductive of intelligence.Moreover, the Japanese maintained an extremely high levelof security. “The Day of Infamy” was not just an Americanintelligence failure. It was also a brilliant Japanese intelligencesuccess.FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (1882-1945),President of the United States, 1933-45,encouraged Churchill with Lend-Leasewhile Britain stood alone. Conspiracy theoristshave accused him of knowing inadvance of the Pearl Harbor attack, whichwould mean that he was either a fiendishmanipulator of intelligence or criminallyignorant and naive. Neither is true.Pearl Harbor to Teheran:DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890-1969),Supreme Commander Allied Forces inEurope and later 34th President of theUnited States, 1953-61. When GeneralEisenhower arrived in Britain prior to theinvasion of North Africa in 1942, Churchillimmediately informed him of the existenceof the Ultra code-breaking operations.Photo: Karsh of Ottawa.Of course, the specific claims about JN-25 must bedistinguished from the more general point that British andAmerican intelligence had long been predicting a Japaneseattack, somewhere. The Magic (diplomatic) interceptsunambiguously revealed by late November that Tokyo hadopted for war. But the consensus in London andWashington was that Japan’s most likely target was thePhilippines and South-East Asia.Churchill knew a Japanese attack was coming. Everyday personal files of intercepts were sent him from BletchleyPark. They were released to the public only in 1993. Theyreveal that on 6 December, Churchill read a telegram fromthe Japanese Foreign Minister in Tokyo to his ambassadorin London, instructing him to destroy all except certain keycodes and burn codes and secret documents. But neitherthis nor any other intercept he read in the forty-eight hoursbefore Pearl Harbor contained any hint of the actual target.Indeed, he was still desperately seeking it up to the lastminute. We know this because Malcolm Kennedy, a FirstWorld War veteran and Japanese linguist, was one of thoseon high alert at Bletchley Park. Against all the rules, he kepta diary that still survives. On December 5th he had been on24-hour duty. The next day, he noted that Churchill “is allover himself at the moment for latest information and indicationsre Japan’s intentions and rings up at all hours of theday and night, except for the 4 hours in each 24 (2 to 6pm)when he sleeps.” On December 7th, when Kennedy, likeChurchill, heard the news of Japan’s attack on the wireless,he recorded his “complete surprise.” If Kennedy, working atBletchley Park, did not know in advance of Pearl Harbor,how would Churchill?FINEST HOUR 149 / 16

“Churchill exploited intelligence inall its guises as no other politicianbefore him—and certainly moreeffectively than either of his wartimeallies, Josef Stalin and FranklinRoosevelt. He left an indelible markon British intelligence, and theAnglo-American alliance owes morethan history acknowledges to hisfervent support.”CHURCHILL AND INTELLIGENCE...overseas asset. In 1951 Mossadeq nationalised this hatedsymbol of British imperialism and expelled its British technicians.The next year he kicked out all British diplomats.By 1953, London and Washington wanted to get rid ofhim. No one disliked him more than Churchill. As FirstLord of the Admiralty WSC had played a leading role innegotiating the Anglo-Iranian oil deal in the first place. Inprivate he mocked Mossadeq as “Mussy Duck.”The second actor was the head of the SIS in Iran, theHonourable “Monty” Woodhouse, later Tory MP forOxford. But he was more than that. In the Second WorldWar he’d been one of those brave young warriors fightingbehind enemy lines—in his case Greece, close to his andChurchill’s heart. In 1942 he’d helped blow up theGorgopotamos Viaduct carrying vital German supplies toNorth Africa. In 1944 he, too, had received a summons toChequers, where Churchill had taken a shine to him.Something else had happened while Woodhouse wasin England. Lunching with Anthony Eden, a fellow guestwas an attractive war widow named Davina Lytton. She wasthe daughter of the young woman who fifty years beforehad stunningly captured Churchill’s heart in India, PamelaPlowden. Romance again flourished, and Davina andMonty were soon married. “Our man in Teheran” had apersonal link with Churchill.The final actor was also well known to Churchill andhad a name resonant in the United States. Kermit Rooseveltwas a grandson to Theodore and cousin to Franklin. Heand Churchill had met at the White House Christmas partyin December 1941, and since then he’d risen high in theCIA. Now he was its field commander in Iran.The SIS and CIA concocted a joint plan to toppleMossadeq in a coup. In July 1953 Kermit Roosevelt secretlyentered Iran and, in several clandestine nighttime encounterswith the Shah worthy of any thriller, persuaded him tocooperate. In London, Woodhouse had several meetingswith Churchill. When a hesitant Anthony Eden, theForeign Secretary, fell sick, Churchill took over and gave thegreen light to the plot. In August, Teheran was convulsed incarefully-prepared rent-a-crowd riots and Mossadeq wasduly deposed.A week later a triumphant Kermit Roosevelt arrived atHeathrow Airport en route for Washington. SIS top brassgave him a splendid lunch at the Connaught Hotel beforehis final appointment of the day: Ten Downing Street.Characteristically defying his medical advisers, Churchillhad soldiered on since his stroke in June. Events in Teheranhad gripped his imagination. Learning that Roosevelt was inLondon, he demanded a personal account.At precisely 4 o’clock, Roosevelt rang the doorbell andwas ushered in by a military aide. Downstairs, in a receptionroom converted into a bedroom, he found the PrimeMinister, lying in bed propped up by pillows. Churchillgrunted a greeting, and Roosevelt sat down beside him. Thetwo men began with small talk and exchanged reminiscencesabout the White House Christmas Party. ThenRoosevelt launched on his tale, presenting the dramatichighlights in considerable detail. Churchill frequently interruptedwith questions and from time to time would dozeoff for a few moments, only to awake and grill theAmerican on a point of detail. For a full two hours the twomen talked.When Roosevelt had completed his account,Churchill grinned and shifted himself up on his pillows.“Young man,” he said, “if I had been but a few yearsyounger, I would have loved nothing better than to haveserved under your command in this great venture!”With this telling vignette I must take my leave ofChurchill. A warrior to the end, he’d exploitedintelligence in all its guises as no other politicianbefore him—and certainly more effectively than eitherof his wartime allies, Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt. Heleft an indelible mark on British intelligence, which servedhim well both in peace and war during his fifty year politicalcareer. The Anglo-American intelligence alliance thatendures to this day owes more than history acknowledges tohis fervent support.The quest to understand the protean figure ofWinston Churchill grows, not diminishes, with the passageof time. As we peel away the layers of historical varnish, theportrait becomes ever richer and more complex. His adventuresin the secret world of intelligence make him an evenmore intriguing figure than we thought. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 18

R I D D L E S , M Y S T E R I E S , E N I G M A SHarvie-Watt: Behind Closed DoorsWhile visiting the secret War Rooms and Churchill Museum in London,Qxwe saw the rooms occupied by Winston Churchill’s staff and assistants.The doors were open so that visitors could see where the people worked andslept during the Blitz. But there was one exception: a closed door under a signreading, “General Harvie-Watt.” Is there a reason for this? I understand thatHarvie-Watt was a personal assistant to Churchill, and influential, yet I foundno reference to him in the museum. —ADRIAN LOTHERINGTONAPhil Reed, director of the WarRooms, advises that Harvie-Watt’sroom has never been open since thearea was refurbished in 2003. Althoughsome rooms were restored to theirwartime appearance, space limitationsprevented more. The room housescomputer service equipment.George Harvie-Watt (1903-1989) was Conservative MP forKeighley, 1931-35, and for Richmond,Surrey, 1937-59. He was educated atGeorge Watson’s College, Edinburgh,then at the University of Glasgow andthe University of Edinburgh. He wascommissioned into the TerritorialArmy Royal Engineers in 1924 andbecame a barrister at Inner Temple in1930. In 1941-45 he was WSC’sParliamentary Private Secretary, so hewould certainly be entitled to a roomin the bunker.Harvie-Watt became a LieutenantColonel in the Territorial Army in1938 and was promoted to Brigadier in1941—hence the “General” title. Manycopies of his memoirs, Most of My Life(London: Springwood, 1980) are availableon bookfinder.com. There areseveral mentions of him in JockColville’s memoirs, The Churchilliansand Fringes of Power, and of course hecomes up in Sir Martin Gilbert’s officialbiography, Winston S. Churchill.In Volume VI, 828-29, is anamusing account from autumn 1940,when Harvie-Watt was commandingan anti-aircraft unit during a visit byChurchill and General Pile, whichhelps explain why WSC later madehim his PPS—and why Churchill wasable to imbibe so many whiskies—henever drank them neat!....As they arrived, Pile told Harvie-Wattthat Churchill was “frozen and in aHARVIE-WATT from the jacket of hismemoir, Most of My Life. Below: withChurchill and Inspector Thompson onV-E Day, London, 8 May 1945.bad temper” and suggested that thePrime Minister be brought “a strongwhisky and soda.” Harvie-Watt sent adespatch rider to find one.“Meanwhile,” he later recalled, “everythingwas going from bad to worse.The field was almost waterlogged andthe rain poured down. Everything Itried to show the Prime Minister hehad seen before.” The searchlightSend your questions to the editorcontrol radar set, which hadworked on the previousnight, failed to function.A few days earlier it had beenannounced that because of illhealth,Chamberlain wouldresign as Leader of the ConservativeParty. The question being muchdebated was whether or not Churchillshould succeed Chamberlain as Leader.“I said it would be fatal if he did notlead the Conservative Party,” Harvie-Watt recalled, “as the bulk of the partywas anxious that he should be theLeader now we were at war.”Churchill, however, “was still suspiciousof [the Conservatives] and oftheir attitude to him before the war. Isaid it was only a small section of theparty that took that line and that themass of the party was with him. Mystrongest argument, however, and I feltthis very much, was that it was essentialfor the PM to have his ownparty—a strong one with alliesattracted from the main groups andespecially the Opposition parties. Butessentially he must have a majority andI was sure this majority could onlycome from the Conservative Party.”Not wishing to miss an opportunity ofadvice from a member of the WhipsOffice, Churchill questioned Harvie-Watt about “the strength of Ministersand what influence they wielded.”Harvie-Watt replied: “If you have astrong army of MPs under you,Ministers would be won over orcrushed, if necessary.” Churchill, henoted, “seemed to appreciate my argumentsand thanked me very much.Then he began to feel the cold againand agitated to get away.”At this moment the despatch riderarrived with the whisky, and Harvie-Wattpoured one for the freezing PrimeMinister. Churchill swallowed a halftumbler,then cried out at the taste of theneat whisky: “You have poisoned me.”Churchill did not nurse a bottle,as an alcoholic would, and occasionallyremarked to those who took whiskyneat, “you are not likely to live a longlife if you drink it like that.” Perhapsthis is more than you wanted to knowabout George Harvie-Watt. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 19

C H U R C H I L L A N D I N T E L L I G E N C EGolden Eggs: The Secret War, 1940-1945Part I: Britain and AmericaChurchill used secret intelligence on a global scale, freely shared it with the Americans, andmade it count in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Cabinet’s unanimous decision to aid Greecein 1941 would not have been made were it not for the Enigma decrypts.M A R T I N G I L B E R TCOLOSSUS: the world’s first electronic, programmable computer, above,was vital in the preparation of Churchill’s “Golden Eggs.” Commencing in1994, a team led by Tony Sale began reconstruction of a Colossus atBletchley Park. Right: Mr. Sale supervises the breaking of an encypheredmessage with the completed machine. (MaltaGC/Wikimedia)Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940.Twelve days later, on 22 May, the codebreakers atBletchley Park broke the Enigma key most frequentlyused by the German Air Force. This was the hourlytwo-way top-secret radio traffic between the combinedGerman Army, Navy and Air Force headquarters at Zossenand the commanders-in-chief on the battlefronts.Included in the newly broken key were the top-secretmessages of German Air Force liaison officers with theGerman Army. The daily instructions of these liaison officersincluded targets, supply and, crucially, details ofshortages such as aviation fuel.In the desperate days of late May and early June1940—when the British Expeditionary Force was beingevacuated from Dunkirk—daily decrypts indicated the positionand intentions of the German field formations as theyturned towards the sea. Even with delays in decrypting individualEnigma messages taking, at that time, up to six days,this was an indispensable benefit in guiding the continuationof the evacuation to the last possible moment.As the German air Blitz on Britain intensified inAugust and September 1940, fears of invasion mounted.On 11 September Churchill received details of an Enigmadecrypt that suggested that invasion plans were being made._______________________________________________________________________________________________________The Rt. Hon. Sir Martin Gilbert CBE was named the official biographer of Sir Winston Churchill following the death of Randolph Churchillin 1968, and has now published almost as many words on his subject as Churchill himself. “Official” is something of a misnomer, sincehe was never told what to write or what position to take on any aspect of the story. Winston S. Churchill, with eight narrative volumesand sixteen companion or document volumes, and more to come, is the longest biography ever published. It is now being reprinted infull by Hillsdale College Press, which offers all volumes so far published at affordable prices. See: http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/freedomlibrary/churchill.asp.Sir Martin is an honorary member of The Churchill Centre and has been a contributor to Finest Hour for nearlythirty years. For further information see http://www.martingilbert.com.FINEST HOUR 149 / 20

British Military Intelligence commented on this decrypt:“Although there are a number of possible reasons forthis order, it cannot be overlooked that it may be in connectionwith the movement of troops and armament forinvasion purposes.” 1Throughout the autumn and winter of 1940, thesearch for indications of a German invasion remained thetop priority of the Bletchley eavesdroppers. On 10 October1940, Churchill was shown summaries of decrypts ofGerman Air Force top-secret signals that had revealed,among other German instructions, the appointment in thefirst week of October of German Air Force officers to theembarkation staffs at Antwerp, Ostend, Dunkirk andCalais, where air reconnaissance—another indispensablearm of Intelligence—revealed the presence of what couldwould well have been invasion barges.Top-secret instructions had also been decrypted atBletchley with regard to a German air formation headquarters,which was known to be in charge of German Air Forceequipment in Belgium and Northern France, “settling thedetails of loading of units and equipment into ships.” On24 September 1940 the German Third Air Fleet receivedorders, also decrypted at Bletchley, concerning the supply ofair/sea rescue vessels by seaplane bases off Norway and alongthe North Sea and Channel coasts “in connection,” as themessage sent to Churchill explained, “with the Seelöwe (SeaLion) operation,” presumed to be the invasion of Britain.On 9 October 1940 a further decrypt revealed that onthe previous day the headquarters of the Second GermanAir Fleet “asked for provision of two tankers each filled withapproximately 250,000 gallons of aviation fuel to be held inreadiness for S+3 day (presumably the third day of invasionoperations against UK) at Rotterdam and Antwerp.” 2It was not until 12 January 1941 that Churchillreceived the details of an Enigma decrypt that German AirForce wireless stations on the circuit of the air formationheadquarters responsible for German Air Force equipmentin Belgium and Northern France—equipment that wasknown to have been on standby for invasion duties—was“no longer to be manned as from January 10.” 3The danger of invasion was over. Other decrypts werenow making it clear that the new German focus of militaryand air preparations was against its ally and partner of theprevious sixteen months, the Soviet Union. 4Churchill’s VigilanceAs Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, Churchillwas intensely concerned with maintaining the secrecy of allaspects of war policy and planning. In no area was secrecymore important to him than with regard to Enigma.On 16 October 1940 he wrote to General Ismay, headof his Defence Office: “I am astounded at the vast congregationwho are invited to study these matters. The AirMinistry is the worst offender and I have marked a numberwho should be struck off at once, unless after careful considerationin each individual case it is found to beindispensable that they should be informed. I have addedthe First Lord, who of course must know everything knownto his subordinates, and also the Secretary of State for War.”Churchill continued: “A machinery should be constructedwhich makes other parties acquainted with suchinformation as is necessary to them for the discharge of theirparticular duties. I await your proposals. I should also addCommander-in-Chief Fighter and Commander-in-ChiefBomber Command, it being clearly understood that theyshall not impart them to any person working under them orallow the boxes to be opened by anyone save themselves.” 5Within three weeks of Churchill’s minute to Ismay,the number of recipients of Enigma-based material hadbeen fixed at thirty-one.Churchill’s vigilance was continual. In September1941, on reading the wide circulation given to a 7 a.m.summary of a series of decrypts giving the movement ofGerman fuel ships in the Mediterranean between Naplesand the North African port of Bardia, he wrote to BrigadierStewart Menzies, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service(MI6), and to the Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff: “Surelythis is a dangerously large circulation. Why sh[oul]d anyonebe told but the 3 C-in-Cs. They can give orders withoutgiving reasons. Why should such messages go to subsidiaryHQs in the Western Desert.” 6When Churchill travelled outside London and overseas,the summaries and assessments of Enigma decryptswere sent on to him by courier or top-secret radio signal. >>“When Churchill travelled outside London and overseas, the summaries andassessments of Enigma decrypts were sent on to him by courier or top-secret radiosignal. When he was in Britain, translated summaries of the decrypts, and theBletchley assessments, were sent him in locked buff-coloured boxes to which healone had the key. None of his Private Office knew what the contents were.”FINEST HOUR 149 / 21

GOLDEN EGGS...When he was in Britain, translated summaries of thedecrypts, and the Bletchley assessments, were sent him inlocked buff-coloured boxes to which he alone had the key.None of his Private Office knew what the contents were. Ashis Junior Private Secretary, John Colville, noted in his diaryat Chequers in May 1941: “The PM, tempted by thewarmth, sat in the garden working and glancing at me withsuspicion from time to time in the (unwarranted) belief thatI was trying to read the contents of his special buff boxes.” 7Churchill made his first visit to Bletchley on 6September 1941. His Principal Private Secretary, JohnMartin, who accompanied him in the car on their way toOxfordshire for the weekend, did not enter the building,and had no idea what went on there. 8Following his visit to Bletchley, Churchill received aletter, dated 21 October 1941, from four Bletchley cryptographers,Gordon Welchman, Stuart Milner-Barry, AlanTuring and Hugh O’D. Alexander. In their letter, theyurged Churchill to authorize greater funding for the workthey were doing. Manual decoding was extremely time-consuming.Turing believed that a machine he haddevised—the “bombe,” then in its early days—could speedup the task considerably, but that more funding and morestaff were needed. Milner-Barry later explained: “The cryptographerswere hanging on to a number of keys by theircoattails and if we had lost any or all of them there wasno guarantee (given the importance of continuity inbreaking) that we should ever have found ourselves in businessagain.” 9In view of the exceptional secrecy, Milner-Barry tookthe letter by hand to 10 Downing Street. He later reflected:“The thought of going straight from the bottom to the topwould have filled my later self with horror and incredulity.”On receipt of the letter, Churchill wrote to the head of hisDefence Office, General Ismay (his letter marked “ActionThis Day”): “Make sure they have all they want on extremepriority and report to me that this has been done.” 10“Almost from that day,” Milner-Barry recalled, “therough ways began to be made smooth. The flow of bombeswas speeded up, the staff bottlenecks relieved, and we wereable to devote ourselves uninterruptedly to the business inhand.” Brigadier Menzies—who rebuked GordonWelchman when they met for having “wasted fifteenminutes” of the Prime Minister’s time—reported toChurchill on November 18th that every possible measurewas being taken. Bletchley’s needs were met.Churchill, fully aware of the crucial role of BletchleyPark in averting defeat—and in due course, if all went wellon the battlefield, to secure victory—had ensured that fundswould be made available to improve the bombe, which wasdecisively to accelerate the decrypting of Enigma messages.In the second week of March 1943, Enigma decryptsof German dispositions in the Mediterranean disclosed thatfour merchant vessels and a tanker, whose cargoes weredescribed by Field Marshal Kesselring as “decisive for thefuture conduct of operations” in North Africa, would sailfor Tunisia on March 12th and 13th, in two convoys.Alerted by this decrypt, British air and naval forcessank the tanker and two of the merchant ships.Unfortunately, before despatching the interceptingforce, the British planners of the operation failed to providesufficient alternative sightings, so as to protect the Enigmasource. An Enigma decrypt on March 14th made it clearthat the suspicions of the German Air Force had beenaroused, and that a breach of security was being blamed forthe loss of the vital cargoes. Churchill, reading this decrypt,minuted at once that the Enigma should be withheld unlessit was “used only on great occasions or when thoroughlycamouflaged.” 11Fortunately for Britain, the Germans did not suspectthat their Enigma secret was the cause of this apparentbreach of their security. Nor did the Germans manage tobreak into Britain’s own Signals Intelligence system. Hadthey done so, they would have learned at once that Enigmahad been compromised.What to Tell the Americans?Following the visit to Britain of President Roosevelt’semissary Harry Hopkins, in January 1941, Churchill agreedthat the United States could share information concerningEnigma, and could do so without delay. In February 1941the Currier-Sinkov mission from the United States broughta Japanese Foreign Office “Purple” cypher machine andother codebreaking items to Bletchley, where ColonelTiltman’s solutions of Japanese army code systems, whichhe explained to the American cryptographers during theirvisit, represented the first solutions of Japanese army materialthat United States cryptanalysts had seen. 12In his own reading of Enigma, Churchill was alwayson the lookout for items that he felt should be sent toRoosevelt. Especially with Enigma decrypts and interpretationsthat related to the Far East and the Pacific, he wouldnote for Brigadier Menzies: “Make sure the President knowsthis” or “make sure the President sees this.” 13In April 1942, four months after the Japanese attackon Pearl Harbor, Churchill authorized the visit by ColonelTiltman to OP-20-G, the United States Navy’s cryptanalyticoffice in Washington DC. 14 During Tiltman’s visit itbecame clear that the United States Navy wanted to attackthe German naval “Shark” key, against which Bletchley hadmade almost no progress since the introduction of the fourrotorEnigma (M4) on 1 February 1942: this Shark keyprovided the German Navy with all top-secret communicationswith its submarines.On 8 February 1942, Churchill wrote to Menzies:“Do the Americans know anything about our machine? Letme know by tomorrow afternoon.” Colonel Menzies repliedFINEST HOUR 149 / 22

Intelligence: In the Great Drama,They Were the GreatestSEE ALSO ALAN TURING (BACK COVER)THOMAS H. FLOWERS (1905-1998)was the father of Colossus, theworld’s first programmable computer,which helped solve the encryptedGerman messages. It was Flowerswho provided the secret decrypts toEisenhower the day before D-Day,revealing that Hitler was moving noadditional troops to Normandy,believing it was not the target.JOHN TILTMAN (1894-1982) hadworked with British Intelligence sincethe 1920s. Brigadier Tiltman had madea series of major breakthroughsagainst Japanese military cyphers from1933 onwards. A strong advocate ofBritish cryptology cooperation with theUnited States, he was affectionatelyknown to both sides as “The Brig.”HUGH O’D. ALEXANDER (1909-1974)was an Irish-born cryptanalyst morefamous after the war as a master chessplayer. Arriving at Bletchley Park inFebruary 1940, he played a key role atHut 6, which broke the German Armyand Air Force Enigma messages; then,at Hut 8, he broke the Naval Enigma.After the war he assisted MI5 in theVenona project to break Soviet codes.MAX H.A. NEWMAN (1897-1984), amathematician, was a pioneer of electronicdigital computing. In 1943 heheaded a new Bletchley section tocounter the German Tunny teleprintercypher device, increasingly used byHitler and his top command after 1941,when they began to suspect Enigmawas compromised.WILLIAM GORDON WELCHMAN(1906-1985), a British-American mathematicianand professor, came toBletchley from Cambridge. He was oneof the four “Wicked Uncles” (withAlexander, Turing and Stuart Milner-Barry) who in October 1941 urged thePM to provide more resources toBletchley. Churchill responded.TELFORD TAYLOR (1908-1998) joined U.S.Army Intelligence as a Major in 1942 and ledthe American analysis of German communicationsusing shared British Ultra encryptions.In 1943 he helped negotiate the Anglo-American BRUSA Agreement, secret until themid-1990s. A lawyer, Taylor was a prosecutioncounsel at the Nuremberg Trials of Naziwar criminals. In the 1950s he was an outspokencritic of Senator Joseph McCarthyand, in the 1960s, of the war in Vietnam.on the following day: “The American Naval Authoritieshave been given several of our Cypher Machines.” 15In May 1942, Churchill approved Menzies’ agreementto help OP-20-G to work on the “Shark” key and otherGerman Enigma circuits. OP-20-G eventually built morethan a hundred four-rotor bombes that proved invaluable insolving—between June 1943 and April 1945—not only2940 German Naval Enigma keys, but also 1600 GermanArmy and Air Force Enigma keys, all of which were thenread at Bletchley without interruption. 16In June 1942, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrivedin Britain as Commander-in-Chief of the United StatesForces then being assembled as a prelude to a cross-Channelassault. Churchill invited him to Chequers, where he personallybriefed him on the work being done at Bletchley, towhich, as a Commander-in-Chief, he would have access. 17On 17 May 1943 the British-United States Agreement(BRUSA) was signed between Bletchley Park and theUnited States War Department. This came to be known asthe “written constitution” of Anglo-American cryptanalysis.18 Its aim was “to exchange completely allinformation concerning the detection, identification andinterception of signals from, and the solution of codes andcyphers used by, the Military and Air forces of the Axispowers, including secret services (Abwehr).” The UnitedStates assumed the “main responsibility” for the reading ofJapanese military and air codes and cyphers (Magic), theBritish for reading the German and Italian signals traffic(Ultra). There would be total reciprocity, and total secrecy. 19Following this agreement, Colonel Alfred McCormackand Lieutenant-Colonel Telford Taylor, from the UnitedStates Army’s Special Branch, were sent to Bletchley to seehow the system there operated. It was not until September1943, however, that Churchill finally persuaded Menziesthat the BRUSA agreement should be operated without anyrestrictions, and that the United States Army in Washingtonshould be sent—without restriction—all British SignalsIntelligence material, including the Enigma andGeheimschreiber decrypts. 20Riddle of the BalkansEnigma-based knowledge was continuous, and calledfor many difficult decisions. The most difficult to confrontChurchill and the War Cabinet, and those in receipt ofEnigma-based information, related to the Balkans. In thelast week of October and the first few days of November1940, Enigma decrypts had made it clear that the GermanAir Force was building up facilities for German aircraft usein Romania and Bulgaria, both on the Danube and theBlack Sea. 21 This information was set out in a War Cabinetpaper on 5 November 1940. 22The possibility of a German attack on Greece, withwhom Britain had a treaty of alliance, meant that Britishmilitary, naval and air forces then protecting Egypt from >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 23

GOLDEN EGGS...attack across the Western Desert would have to be divertedto Greece. Enigma-based evidence of an attack mounted. Atthe Defence Committee (Operations) meeting of 8 January1941, where all present were privy to Enigma, Churchillnoted that “all information pointed to an early advance bythe German Army, which was massing in Roumania, withthe object of invading Greece via Bulgaria.” 23As a result of assessments being made at Bletchley, thisand further Enigma decrypts in the following two daysenabled Churchill to inform the Army and Air ForceCommanders-in-Chief in the Middle East—General Wavelland Air Chief Marshal Longmore—that “a large-scalemovement may begin on or soon after 20th March.” 24Enigma showed that the force that had been assembled forwhatever action was planned included two armoured divisionsand 200 dive bombers.Enigma continued to confirm the German threat toGreece. A crucial decrypt on January 9th gave the news thatGerman Air Force personnel were moving into Bulgaria tolay down telephone and teleprinter lines to the Bulgarian-Greek border along the main axis of advance towardsSalonika. 25 A decrypt of January 18 showed German AirForce hutments being sent to Bulgaria. 26 A decrypt two dayslater showed that the German Air Force mission inRomania was discussing long-term arrangements for thesupply of German Air Force fuel to depots in Bulgaria. 27As evidence mounted, a political decision was essential.The War Cabinet’s unanimous conclusion was thatBritain must come to the aid of Greece, however hopelessthat task might be. With Enigma, the facts were known wellin advance, adding to the pressure for a decision. WithoutEnigma, the dilemma would not have arisen until too late.German, Hungarian and Italian troops attackedYugoslavia and Greece on 6 April 1941. By April 30th bothnations had been overrun. Between April 24th and 30th,more than 30,000 British, Australian and New Zealandtroops were evacuated to Crete, where they awaited asecond German onslaught. On the 28th, Enigma revealedthe German intention for an air-supported attack, andChurchill telegraphed to General Wavell, Commander-in-Chief, Middle East (then in Cairo): “It seems clear from ourinformation that a heavy airborne attack by German troopsand bombers will soon be made on Crete.” 28It would be an entirely airborne attack. But how wasthe commander on Crete, New Zealand General BernardFreyberg, who was not privy to Enigma, to be informedwithout endangering the source? On May 7th, Churchillproposed that Freyberg be sent actual texts of the decryptsrelating to German plans for a parachute landing at MalemeAirport in Crete. This was done, but the Secret IntelligenceService warned Freyberg not to act on this informationunless he had at least one non-Enigma source for it—lestthe Germans realise that their own top-secret communica-tions had been broken. As he did not have any other source,Freyberg was unable to make the necessary dispositions toconcentrate his defences at Maleme.Desperate for Freyberg to see the actual texts of thedecrypts regarding German plans for glider and parachuteattacks, Churchill wrote to the three Chiefs of Staff on May10th: “So important do I consider all this aspect that itwould be well to send a special officer by air to see GeneralFreyberg and show him personally the actual texts of all themessages bearing upon this subject. The officer would beanswerable for their destruction in the event of enginefailure en route. No one should be informed but theGeneral, who would give his orders to his subordinateswithout explaining his full reasons.” 29The airborne landings took place on 20 May 1941. Inthe fighting that followed, 5326 Allied and 6565 Germansoldiers were killed; 12,000 British and Commonwealthforces were evacuated from Crete between 28 and 31 May;12,254 were taken prisoner by the Germans. During thenaval actions around the island, eight British warships weresunk. There had been no way to take advantage of theGerman Enigma messages on land or at sea.Euphemisms for EnigmaUsed by Churchill in telegrams and messages cited above.(Churchill also spoke of his “Golden Eggs”)Boniface • An unimpeachable sourceA reliable source • Most secret sourcesSpecial sources • Special informationSpecial stuff • Our special stuffSure information • Our information hereOur special sources of informationPeril in the AtlanticIn the summer of 1940 the cryptologists at Bletchleyhad broken the settings of the German Home Waters NavalEnigma, but these settings were changed at the end of1940. From that moment, sinkings by German submarineswere heavy and continuous, even reaching the Atlantic coastof Canada and the United States.A breakthrough in Bletchley’s ability to read theGerman Naval Enigma came with the Lofoten Islands raidon 4 March 1941. Proposed by Hugh Dalton, the head ofSpecial Operations Executive (SOE), and approved byChurchill and the Chiefs of Staff, the raid—OperationClaymore—was much boasted publicly as having been forthe destruction of the fish oil processing plant there. Thiswas the most important source by which Germany obtainedvitamins A and D: indeed, during the raid, eleven factoriesand 800,000 tons of fish oil were destroyed.The actual aim of the raid, kept secret throughout thewar and for many years after 1945, was to capture anEnigma machine used by the German Navy, the code keysFINEST HOUR 149 / 24

of which had been proving virtually impossible to break.One such Enigma machine was on board the Germantrawler Krebs. Its commander, Lieutenant Hans Küpfinger,had managed to throw his machine overboard before he waskilled. He had insufficient time, however, to destroy otherelements of the Enigma message procedure, including hiscoding documents.After three weeks’ intensive work at Bletchley, itbecame possible for British Intelligence to read all Germannaval traffic in Home Waters for the last week of April andmuch of May, with a relatively short delay of between threeand seven days. By July the German naval Home Watersmessages were being read with a maximum delay of seventytwohours, and often with a delay of only a few hours.On 6 April 1941, Churchill informed Roosevelt of aBritish naval success in the Mediterranean: A convoy of fiveGerman and Italian supply ships loaded with ammunitionand transport vehicles was sunk, along with three Italiandestroyer escorts, with the loss of only one British destroyer.The enemy supply ships were carrying units of the 15thPanzer Division to North Africa. The engagement constitutedthe first significant victory for Bletchley’s decryptingof the German Air Force Enigma in the Mediterraneanshipping war. Henceforth, and with increasing impact,German and Italian high-grade decrypts were to contributesignificantly to the sinking of Axis supply ships.This Enigma window into German naval operationscame, however, to an abrupt end. At the end of January1942 the U-boats, which had hitherto used the sameEnigma machine as other ships and authorities both inGerman home waters and in the Atlantic, acquired theirown form of Enigma machine, unique to them. Suddenly,the U-boat’s most secret signals, which had been so carefullymonitored at Bletchley since the summer of 1941,became unreadable once more, and were to remain unreadablefor nearly a year, followed by a further six monthsirregularities and delays in decrypting.This had dire consequences. In April 1941 more thanseventy British merchant ships had been sunk; in May 1941more than ninety; in June, sixty. By the end of July 1941,however, as a result of remarkable progress at BletchleyPark, all German U-boat instructions were being read continuously,and with little or no delay. As a result,transatlantic convoys could be routed away from the U-boatpacks. For the rest of 1941, one major area of Churchill’sanguish was calmed.By the end of August, British naval sinkings werefurther reduced by another cryptographic success, thebreaking of the Italian naval high-grade cypher machine,“C.38m.” The first intelligence transmitted from BletchleyPark to the Middle East from this new source was sent toCairo on June 23rd, giving details of the sailing of fourliners from Italy to Africa with Italian troops.In the ever-fluctuating fortunes of the war at sea,Churchill was kept fully informed of the secrets thatEnigma revealed. Sometimes an Enigma message could pinpointa British setback. On 3 September 1941, Churchillwas shown an actual decrypt, which read: “Tanker Ossag toleave Benghazi evening 3rd September after dischargingcargo of aviation fuel.” 30 Distressed that the tanker had notbeen attacked while on its way to Bengazi, Churchill notedthat Admiral Cunningham, Commander-in-Chief,Mediterranean Fleet, “should feel very sorry about this. It isa melancholy failure.” 31On 16 February 1942, German Enigma messagesrevealed to Churchill that the three German warships whichhad escaped from the Atlantic port of Brest through theEnglish Channel to their home ports had been badlydamaged during their transit. He was unable to reveal this,although he was much criticised in Parliament and the pressfor allowing the ships to escape unscathed. As Churchillwarned Roosevelt, “We cannot dwell too much on thedamage they sustained”—damage, Churchill added, “youmay have learned from most secret sources.” 32From the U-boat menace, the nightmare of heavysinkings returned on 1 February 1942, when a new Enigmamachine came into service using a special cypher for theAtlantic and Mediterranean U-boats. The new cypherremained unbroken for more than ten months, until anEnigma machine was recovered with all its rotors. 33 This wasa turning point for the naval codebreakers in Hut 8 atBletchley, who passed on the new decrypts to the NavalSection in Hut 4, for translation, intelligence extraction andtransmission to Brigadier Menzies, the Chief of the NavalStaff and Churchill.The new German Naval Enigma came into beingafter—on at least two occasions—Allied success against theU-boat operations led Vice-Admiral Karl Dönitz, thenCommander of the German Submarine Force, to investigatea possible security breach as the reason. Two breaches wereconsidered most seriously: espionage, and Allied interceptionand decoding of the German Naval Enigma. Twoinvestigations into communications security came to theconclusion espionage was more likely, unless there was athird reason, that the Allied success had been accidental.Nevertheless, as a precautionary measure, on 1 February1942, Dönitz ordered his U-boat fleet to use an improvedversion of the Enigma machine—the M4—for communicationswithin the Fleet.The German Navy—of which Dönitz became theCommander-in-Chief in 1943—was the only branch of theGerman armed services to use this improved version; theGerman Army and Air Force continued to use their existingversions of Enigma. The new system, known to theGermans as “Triton,” was called “Shark” by the Allies.This setback caused by “Shark,” coming at a timewhen the U-boat fleet was rapidly increasing in size, coincidedwith a move of the U-boats to what Churchill >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 25

GOLDEN EGGS...called “American Waters”: the Atlantic west of the 40thMeridian, and the Caribbean. U-boat successes there for sixconsecutive months were largely responsible for an alarminglysharp rise in the monthly rate of Allied merchant shiplosses, especially of oil tankers. When, in the late summer of1942, the U-boats turned once more against the Atlanticconvoys, these losses were to reach unprecedented levels.This second loss of the ability to decrypt top-secretGerman naval signals brought Britain’s food and war materialslifeline almost to a halt. For Churchill, as for those inthe know about the full extent of the sinkings and thefailure to read Enigma, this was a grave worry. On theevening of 18 November, Churchill presided at the firstmeeting of the newly established Anti-U-boat WarfareCommittee, charged with finding some means to meet therelentless challenge of German submarine successes.In October that same year, U-boats had sunk twentynineAllied ships in convoy and fifty-four ships sailingindependently. In November the figure rose to thirty-nineships in convoy, and seventy ships sailing independently.The total tonnage of Allied shipping lost to U-boat attackin November 1942 was 721,700 tons, the highest figure forany month of the war.Turning the TideThe reason for these U-boat successes was Bletchley’sinability to read the German Enigma key used in its U-boatcommunications. Then, on 30 October 1942, Britishdestroyers attacked the German submarine U-559 on thesurface in the Eastern Mediterranean, seventy miles off theEgyptian coast. While U-559 was sinking, two Royal Navymen, Lieutenant Tony Fasson and Able Seaman ColinGrazier, from the destroyer Petard, seized two vital Enigmacodebooks. Unable to escape the sinking submarine, theymanaged to pass the codebooks to Canteen AssistantTommy Brown. For their actions, Fasson and Grazier wereeach awarded the George Cross; Brown received the GeorgeMedal, the medal’s youngest recipient; it was discoveredthat he had been under age when he enlisted. 34It took three weeks for the codebooks to reachBletchley Park. When they did, the effect was dramatic. On13 December 1942, a Sunday, the codebreakers in Hut 8worked with as much intensity as they had ever worked totry to crack the M4 “Shark” cypher used by the AdmiralDönitz to communicate with his U-boats in the Atlantic.By midday, solutions of the four-rotor Enigma U-boat keybegan to emerge. During the afternoon, Hut 8 telephonedthe Submarine Tracking Room at the Admiralty to reportthe breakthrough. Within an hour of this news, the firstintercept came through: making known the position offifteen U-boats in the Atlantic. Other intercepts arrived in acontinuous stream until the early hours of the nextmorning. The Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room wasRoyal Navy BagSUNK WITH INTELLIGENCE,thanks to Enigma decrypts, werethe battleships Bismarck (upperleft), May 1941; Scharnhorst(above), December 1943; andTirpitz (left), November 1944;once more able to route British convoys away from GermanU-boat concentrations.As a result of this triumph of cryptography, inDecember 1942, the number of Allied vessels sunk by theU-boats fell to nineteen in convoy and twenty-five sailingindividually. In January 1943 the figures had dropped tofifteen in convoy and eighteen independently, as a result ofsuccessful evasive routing of the known and located dangers.In the Battle of the Atlantic, after a disastrous year, thefortunes of war had turned decisively in favour of the Allies.On 2 May 1943, Bletchley decrypted a telegram fromGeneral Oshima, the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin,reporting to Tokyo that Hitler, while hopeful of a renewedU-boat offensive, had complained to him that because thewar had started too soon, “we have been unable to dominatethe seas.” 35 Two days later, in a lengthy battle, twoU-boat packs attacked and sank twelve merchant ships inconvoy (there were forty-one U-boats in the two packs,seventy merchant ships in the convoy).This German success, the last on such a scale, wasonly achieved with the loss of seven of the U-boats. Notonly did Enigma decrypts in the coming days confirm thisloss, but also gave evidence of the growing U-boat fearsboth of Allied aircraft and of surface escorts.Studying the Enigma decrypts relating to theMediterranean, Churchill learned from German sources ofthe success of Bomber Command attacks on the Port ofTunis. Using the word “Boniface” to imply an Allied agentrather than Germany’s own top-secret signalling system,Churchill telegraphed to Air Marshal Tedder on May 2nd:“Boniface shows the decisive reactions produced upon theenemy, and that the little enemy ships are also important.” 36These “little ships” were those in which, as theEnigma decrypts showed, supplies of fuel and ammunitionwere still reaching Tunis. Larger ships, being more visiblefrom the air, were finding it impossible to get through.In the Mediterranean on May 4th, as a result of anEnigma decrypt, British destroyers sank the Campobasso offCape Bon, and on the following day, also alerted byEnigma, the United States Air Force sank the 6,000-ton SanFINEST HOUR 149 / 26

Antonio: the last large merchant ships to try to reach Tunis.As Churchill had foreseen, the Germans continued to try touse smaller craft, and even planned—as one Enigmadecrypt showed on May 6th—to use U-boats to ferry fuel.On July 8th, Churchill was able to telegraph to Stalinthat in seventy days, fifty U-boats had been sunk. 37 On the14th, he reported to Roosevelt that seven U-boats had beensunk in thirty-six hours, “the record killing of U-boats yetachieved in so short a time.” 38 Guided by Enigma, theBattle of the Atlantic had been won by the Allies. SixtyBritish merchant ships had been sunk in March, thirty-fourin April, thirty-one in May and eleven in June; the Junefigure confirmed that it was safe to release warships andmerchant ships for all theatres of war, including the landingsin Sicily, Italy and Normandy.Churchill could offset the few failures at sea withmany successes. Enigma helped to seal the fate of theGerman battleship Bismarck in May 1941, when 2300German sailors perished, and the battle cruiser Scharnhorstin December 1943, when 1995 of her crew of 2200 werekilled. 39 Another naval challenge, the attempt to destroy theGerman battleship Tirpitz—the largest battleship ever builtin Europe—as she sheltered in Norwegian waters, wasreflected in many German Air Force Enigma messages: one,in April 1942, revealed German appreciation of a “mostcourageous” but ineffective attack that month by BomberCommand. 40 Enigma played its part in the final, successfulattack on Tirpitz by Bomber Command on 12 November1944, when the pride of the German Navy capsized, and1000 of her crew of 1700 were drowned. ,1. War Office papers, WO 199/911A.2. “German Preparations for Invasion”, 4 and 9 October 1940, WarOffice papers, WO 199/911A.3. “Officer Only.” “Most Secret.” “Invasion of Britain,” MI14, 12January 1941: War Office papers, WO 119/911A.4. Secret Intelligence Service papers, series HW1.5. Minute of 16 October 1940: Churchill papers, 20/13.6. Letter of 22 September 1941: Secret Intelligence Service papers,HW1/86.7. John Colville, diary entry, 4 May 1941: Colville papers.8. John Martin papers and conversation with Martin Gilbert, 1979.9. “Secret and Confidential.” “Prime Minister Only.” 21 October 1941:Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the Second World War, volume 2,(HMSO: London 1981), 655.10. “Action This Day.” Hinsley and others, 657.11. Dir/C Archives, No. 2592: Hinsley and others, 647.12. Ralph Erskine and Peter Freeman, “Brigadier John Tiltman: One ofBritain”s finest cryptographers,” Cryptologia, Volume 27, Issue 4, October 2003.13. Churchill’s comments on the Enigma decrypts are in the SecretIntelligence Service papers, reference HW1.14. Office of Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV): 20th Division of theOffice of Naval Communications, G Section/Communications Security, was theU.S. Navy signals intelligence and cryptanalysis group during World War II. Itsmission was to intercept, decrypt, and analyze naval communications fromJapanese, German, and Italian navies. In addition, OP-20-G copied diplomaticmessages of many foreign governments. Its branches included G-30 (PacificTheater), G-40 (Atlantic Theatre), G-70 (Clandestine), G-80 (StrategicInformation Coordination), GI-A (Correlation and Dissemination, Atlantic),GI-D (Correlation and Dissemination, Diplomatic), GI-P (Correlation andDissemination, Pacific), GT (traffic analysis) and GY (cryptanalysis).15. “Most Secret.” 8 February 1942: Churchill papers, 20/52.16. U.S. National Security Agency, Central Security Service, “Solving theEnigma”: http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00016.cfm.17. Stephen Ambrose, Ike’s Spies (Jackson, Mississippi: University Pressof Mississippi, 1981), chapter 1.18. Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret SpecialRelationship 1940-1946 (New York: Presidio, 1993), 153.19. The complete text of BRUSA was kept secret until November 1995,fifty years after the end of the war. It was published in full by John Cary Sims,“The BRUSA Agreement of May 17, 1943,” Cryptologia, Volume 21, Issue 1,January 1997.Endnotes20. Ralph Erskine and Peter Freeman, “Brigadier John Tiltman: One ofBritain’s Finest Cryptographers,” Cryptologia, Volume 27, Issue 4, October2003.21. Decrypt CX/JQ 417, 1 November 1940, revealed German plans toinstall aircraft warning systems in Romania and Bulgaria.22. War Cabinet Paper No. 431 of 1940, 5 November 1940, “Possibilityof Enemy Advance through the Balkans and Syria.” Cabinet papers, 70/1.23. Defence Committee (Operations), 8 January 1941: Cabinet papers,69/2.24. Telegram of 11 January 1941: Churchill papers, 20/49.25. F.H. Hinsley and others, British Intelligence in the Second WorldWar, Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, (HMSO: London, 1979), I: 353.26. Decrypt CX/JQ 603.27. Decrypt CX/JQ 605.28. Telegram of 28 April 1941, telephoned to Downing Street on a secureline from Chequers: Premier papers, 3/109.29. “Most Secret” minute of 10 May 1941: Premier papers, 3/109.30. Enigma decrypt CX/MSS/205/T2 of 3 September 1941.31. 3 September 1941: SIS papers, HW1/43.32. Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram No.257 of 1942, 16 February1942: Churchill papers, 20/70.33. For details of the ten Enigma machines recovered at sea see “TheCapture of German Enigma Machines and Codebooks, 12 February 1940 - 4June 1944” in Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Second World War (New York:Routledge, 2008), Map 204.34. Tommy Brown died later in the war, in Britain, trying to rescue histwo sisters from a burning building.35. Secret Intelligence Service archive, series HW1.36. “Personal,” “Most Secret,” Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram No.630 of 1943, 2 May 1943: Churchill papers 20/111.37. “Personal and Most Secret,” Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram No.975 of 1943, 8 July 1943: Churchill papers, 20/114.38. “Personal and Secret,” Prime Minister’s Personal Telegram No.1031/3 of 1943, 14 July 1943: Churchill papers, 20/115.39. “Sink the Bismarck” was Churchill’s instruction following thesinking of the British battle cruiser Hood by Bismarck on 24 March 1941, with1415 deaths (and only three survivors). During the sinking of Scharnhorstthree days later, the Staff Officer (Intelligence) on board the battleship Duke ofYork was Edward Thomas, later one of the historians of British SignalsIntelligence.40. Decrypt 0011 of 29 April 1942.FINEST HOUR 149 / 27

MedmenhamIn July 1943 I was posted to a typing pool atDanesfield in Medmenham, outside London, with wonderfulviews of the Thames. A neo-Tudor house built in1899, it is now a hotel and spa. Its 300 rooms and extensivegrounds had been commandeered for the war effort.Danesfield served as the Allied Central IntelligenceUnit (ACIU), devoted to photographic intelligence. I wasassigned to an office called “K Section” in one of its tallturrets, and I was the only shorthand typist from the ranks.Again we had to have a cover story. We were told to say wewere in “Maintenance Command.”K Section was staffed by RAF and AmericanIntelligence officers, and three WAAF officers—one ofwhom was Section Officer Sarah Oliver,* daughter of thePrime Minister. A few times—whenever she disappeared—we knew that Mr. Churchill had probably gone overseas,since Sarah often accompanied him as aide de camp—as didher sister Mary, now Lady Soames, on other occasions.Day and night, following the bombing raids overGermany, our officers would interpret photographs taken bysurveillance planes from Lossiemouth, Scotland or fighteraircraft from Benson, Oxfordshire, sent down to us by dispatchriders or Jeeps in relays. At Medmenham, they wereprinted from negatives onto foil photographic sheets.My job was to collect each box-load of photographsfrom various raids, sometimes putting them together with akind of sellotape before passing them to an officer. Usingthe photos as evidence, the officers would then estimate andreport on the damage and recommend whether a site shouldbe retargeted. It was grim but necessary work.*Sarah Churchill, later Lady Audley (1914-1982) was married to thecomedian and singer Vic Oliver from 1936 to 1945.Section Officer Sarah Oliver sat at a desk to my right.She often drafted reports on the raids for me to type in finalform. Her work included interpreting photos with specialglasses that gave a three-dimensional impression, whichhelped to assess the damage more efficiently.I had an electric typewriter, a great novelty at thetime, provided by the Americans. The officers would eitherdictate reports or hand me handwritten drafts to type.There were three shifts, and I could select the shift I wantedto be on; since I was the only shorthand typist available, Iwas kept very busy the whole time.There was a lovely young American officer whom Ithink was rather fond of Sarah Oliver. He would pop overand sometimes kiss my forehead or chat, but then promptlywent over to her. (I think I was a wee decoy.)Having many friends in the theatre, including Sheilavan Damm of the Windmill Theatre in London, Sarah likedto arrange concerts for personnel stationed at RAFMedmenham and Nuneham. She even recruited me as achorus girl, although not of the Windmill variety….**Occasionally when bombers were on a special raidsuch as Dresden and Berlin, we were “locked in,” whichevershift was on; once they had reached their destination, wewere told where they were and permitted to leave for lunchor whatever. After the bombers returned, reconnaissance aircraftwere sent out, flying low to take photographs at greatrisk to pilots and crew. >>**Sheila van Damm (1922-1987) was trained as a WAAF driver in thewar, and began driving competitively in 1950. She won the Coupes desDames, highest award for women, in the 1953 Alpine and 1955 MonteCarlo Rallies, and was Women’s European Touring Champion in 1954.The Windmill, which she managed and later owned from 1960 onwards,was notorious for its nude stage revues and fan dances, inspired by theFolies Bergères and Moulin Rouge in Paris.DANESFIELD, MEDMENHAM. Above: Myra worked in a top window of one of the turrets,overlooking the Thames. Photographs were printed and kept in the ground floor library—along walk to collect them. The flower gardens were beautifully maintained throughout thewar. Returning at midnight from the “Dog and Badger” with her American boyfriend,Sergeant Betty Palmer stepped into the fish pond in error, and began screaming as thehuge goldfish swam round her legs! Right: The author, right, with a fellow WAAF.FINEST HOUR 149 / 29

NOT EXACTLY THE RITZ: Packed up to fifteen and hazy withcigarette and coke fire smoke, the Nissen hut accommodationswere probably more of a threat to us than the Luftwaffe.NUNEHAM PARK, OXFORD: After an illness the author wasposted to this 18th century mansion, now part of Oxford University,where she decyphered and typed notes from prisoners of war.Below: With fellow WAAFs on a day off. Myra Murden is at left.WARTIME PHOTO ANALYSIS...We WAAFs slept in Nissen huts, ten to fifteen in ahut. Many smoked, and with two coke fires going and thewindows shut, it’s a wonder we survived. The officers hadbetter accommodations, with their own mess canteen andbatmen to look after them.On one memorable occasion the Prime Ministerhimself visited us at Medmenham, perhaps to see whatSarah was doing. We were set to smartening up the base.Men painted stones white along the route into Danesfield,while we WAAFs picked up refuse using sticks with nails onthe ends. Sarah rallied round in charge of us, collectingrubbish with great gusto, and we respected her very muchfor doing this dirty chore.My time at Medmenham was interrupted by a case ofjaundice. When I returned from hospital, Sarah Oliveroffered me a private convalescent flat in London. I felt thiswould be an imposition, so she arranged for me to recoverat the Duke of Hamilton’s Dungavel Castle in Scotland, arest home for WAAFs during the war. (Deputy FührerRudolf Hess was attempting to contact this same Duke inhis notorious flight to Britain in May 1941.)Nuneham CourtenayRecuperated, I was posted to Nuneham Park, aPalladian villa at Nuneham Courtenay, Oxford, built in1756 for the First Earl Harcourt. Now owned by OxfordUniversity, it was requisitioned in 1940 by the Ministry ofDefence for photographic reconnaissance interpretation.Stationed in a room over the main door, I was set todecyphering and typing out, from scruffy bits of paper,notes by prisoners of war, mainly held by the Japanese—Ipresume to be put in a War Museum. The American pilotswho were stationed at Nuneham Park (known as PatternMakers Architectural), were taught how to make plaster castmodels of buildings in areas targeted for bombing in the FarEast, so they had more than just a photograph to go by.Some of us WAAFs befriended them and showed themaround the local area.At Nuneham, I was again recruited by Sarah Oliver asa chorus girl for one of the regular concerts. I was cast as amermaid, luring an ATS officer to her death at the bottomof the sea! Foil photos were cut into scales to make my “fishtail,” which I was told not to “rustle” as I walked across thestage. This was Sarah Oliver’s idea. She was full of fun andlovely to work and be with, although as an officer we alwayscalled her “Ma’am.”When the war ended, I was posted to CoastalCommand Headquarters at Pinner, Middlesex, where Iworked for six young grounded aircrew officers. GroupCaptain MacBratney, who was a disciplinarian very muchlike the Prime Minister, promoted me to Corporal. Ienjoyed working for him. Sadly I did not see SectionOfficer Sarah Oliver again, although my friend GillClarkson, who was also in our concerts, became a singer atthe Windmill and married a singer there.Sarah Oliver was a petite, smart figure in her uniform,with auburn hair in a pageboy bob. She had a quiet andkind nature, and was always approachable for advice. Onerespected her rank, and she was a joy to work for. I shallalways consider it an honour to have worked at the WarRooms and with the Prime Minister’s daughter atMedmenham, as well as in her concerts. That experiencewas my university—without the exams. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 30

C H U R C H I L L A N D I N T E L L I G E N C ESIGSALY: Beginning the Digital Revolution“Today digital technology is the backbone of the information industry....But the pioneeringwork for many of these capabilities was performed early in World War II.”—United States National Security AgencyC H R I S T O P H E R H. S T E R L I N GSIGSALY EXHIBIT, National Cryptologic Museum (Wikimedia)The hundreds of wartime messages between Churchilland Roosevelt are well known and documented. Notas well appreciated is that these text messages, sent bysecure teletype, diplomatic cable, or courier, represent only apart of top-level wartime communication. For the twoleaders there was another, faster way to communicate acrossthe Atlantic: the telephone. Protecting the security of thosemessages gave rise to the SIGSALY system—regarded as the“pioneering work” in digital technology by the U.S.National Security Agency. 1In the BeginningWhen the British General Post Office and AmericanTelephone & Telegraph opened the first commercial radiotelephone links in 1927, charges for their use were veryhigh: $75 or £15 for three minutes, about $900 in today’svalues. Trained operators were required to make thecomplex connections. And, because they relied upon radiotransmission (the first telephone cables entered service onlyin 1956), security was a serious problem.Any radio transmission can be intercepted and itscoded signals broken, as the British learned early in WorldWar II from Bletchley Park’s “Ultra” codebreaking effort.Security considerations greatly limited the use of transatlantictelephone calls in the war’s first two years, requiringclose monitoring to ensure that vital information did notreach enemy ears.Nevertheless, the telephone was literally the only wayto communicate over vast distances. Churchill particularlydepended on it, often to the despair of people he wastalking to (see “Joys of the Scrambler” overleaf). At first theAllies tried to protect essential voice traffic with the A-3 >>__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Professor Sterling (chriss@gwu.edu) teaches media law and policy at The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. His articles inFinest Hour include “Churchill Afloat: The Liners He Rode” (FH 121); “Face-Off: Churchill, Reith and the BBC” (FH 128); and “Getting There:Churchill’s Wartime Journeys” (last issue). He also reviews books for FH and the Washington Society for Churchill, which he heads.FINEST HOUR 149 / 31

SIGSALY...voice-scrambling system developed for its commercial telephoneusers by AT&T. Based on 1920s analog technology,it was not nearly secure enough for communicating militarysecrets. 2Well aware of A-3’s shortcomings, American andBritish signals experts insisted that the voice link only beused with carefully controlled code words, so as not toreveal pending plans and operations to enemy listeners.Many senior commanders who telephoned often forgot thewarning, only to be reminded by a censor interrupting theircall. In a March 1942 memo to Churchill’s senior staff, theCabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, warned of thedangers of unguarded reliance on transatlantic radiotelephoneservice. 3The fame of Bletchley Park obscures the fact that theenemy was listening, too, and also had its technical wizards.Germany’s Deutsche Reichpost had established a listeningstation on the Dutch coast by early 1941. GermanIntelliegence developed technical means to detect Alliedtransatlantic signals, and eventually could decode theircontent as they were being sent. Captured records at theend of the war showed just how good the enemy listeningactivity was: The Germans had recorded complete transcriptsof many calls between senior Allied military figures,and even some between Churchill and Roosevelt. 4The telephone nevertheless remained in usethroughout the war because it was simply indispensable,being available at all hours. Censors closely monitoredwhatever anyone, Churchill included, might say on the line.AT&T, understanding the limitations of its A-3scrambler, began seeking a better system as early as 1936.Though many schemes had been patented, none providedabsolute security. In New Jersey, the Bell Laboratoriesresearch team, headed by A.B. Clark, focused on developinga way to turn voice signals into digital data—this at a timewhen digital technology was more theoretical than practical.Homer Dudley, a Bell research physicist, eventuallycreated a “Vocoder” (voice coder) device to convert analogvoice sounds into digital signals while preserving “some”voice quality. An early prototype was demonstrated at the1939 World’s Fair. Research on a viable transmission systemwas initiated as “Project X” in 1940. 5Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor andAmerica’s entry into the war, Bell technicians demonstratedtheir system to the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The Armyissued a contract to build the two trial devices. The firstprototype was completed in August 1942. 6 Its manufacturingpriority was high and security was extremely tight.Indeed, only after high-level negotiations was Bletchley Parkcomputer authority Dr. Alan Turing allowed even to see thedevice, and report his evaluation to Churchill in London. 7As confidence in its ability grew, six terminals had beenordered by late 1943.FINEST HOUR 149 / 32Joys of the Scrambler:Fitzroy Maclean and the PMAn American WAC sergeantexplained that our conversationwould be scrambled,and that we could speak freelywithout fear of being overheardby the enemy. Mr. Churchill’swell-known voice soon camebooming over the ether.“Have you spoken to Pumpkin?”“Pumpkin, Prime Minister? I’m afraid I don’tunderstand what you mean.”“Why that great big general of mine. Andwhat have you done with Pippin?”There was a pause, interrupted only by theinhuman wailing and crackling of the ether.Then, projected over the air, from DowningStreet to Washington, and then back to NorthAfrica, came quite distinctly an exclamation ofhorror and disgust.“Good God, they haven’t got the Code!”A few moments later the Prime Ministerwas back on the air. Shall we scramble?” heasked gaily.“I’m afraid, Prime Minister, that I amscrambled.”There was a rumbling noise, followed bysilence, and Mr. Churchill’s voice came throughagain: “So am I.”After which, much to my relief, we wereable to talk normally…though he continued torefer to Field Marshal Wilson, a rather portlyofficer, as “Pumpkin” and to his son, Randolph,as “Pippin.” The two pseudonyms seemed togive him the greatest pleasure.Having laid down the receiver with reliefafter this unnerving experience, I started up thestairs of our dugout but then turned back tocollect something I’d forgotten. As I opened thedoor, I was startled to hear my own voicecoming through it.“Pumpkin, Prime Minister?”….The prettyAmerican sergeant wasplaying our conversationback to herself, rockingwith laughter. “And in anEnglish accent, too,” Iheard her say.—Sir Fitzroy Maclean, ChurchillTour Dinner, Strachur, Scotland,12 September 1987, Churchill Proceedings 1987

The SIGSALY SystemTo operate this complex system, the U.S. Army 805thSignal Service Company was formed and intensively trainedby AT&T personnel. The 805th comprised eighty-one officers,mostly lieutenants and captains, and 275 technical andmaster sergeants. Eventually, teams of five officers and tenenlisted men (many of whom had worked for the BellSystem before the war) were assigned to keep each of thesystem terminals operating “full-time” (usually eight hours aday, since the devices required rigid maintenance andtesting the rest of the time). Security rules stated that onlyAmerican personnel have access to the equipment—a qualificationthat gave the British pause, but didn’t interfere withoperations. 8Some time in late 1942, the code name SIGSALY wasattached to the project. Not an acronym, though it resembledone, it was simply a cover, the SIG being common inArmy Signal Corps terminology. Operators called prototypes“Green Hornets” (after a popular American radiomelodrama), for the buzzing sound heard by anyoneattempting to eavesdrop on the conversation. After the warit was learned that the Germans had recorded SIGSALYtransmissions, but were unable to decode the signals.As fully developed, the analog vacuum-tube poweredSIGSALY equipment was huge—some forty racks of vacuumtube-powered electrical equipment weighing about fifty-fivetons, taking up 2500 square feet and requiring 30,000 wattsof power. Because of the many heat-producing tubes andcircuits, each terminal was air conditioned—a rare service inWorld War II. 9SIGSALY equipment for London was shipped on HMTQueen Elizabeth in May 1943. It was far too bulky to besqueezed into the offices housing Churchill’s DowningStreet Annexe above the Cabinet War Rooms, let alone thecramped bunker below ground. Space was found about amile away in the basement of Selfridge’s Annexe on OxfordStreet, where the Americans had set up a military communicationscenter. An underground cable linked the two sites.General Sir Hastings Ismay, the PM’s chief of staff,kept Churchill informed on the system’s progress, includingseveral early test failures as operators came up to speed withthe complex device. It was highly secret. Fewer than twentyfiveof the most senior British civilian and military leaderswere cleared to use the London terminal. 10 Installation andtesting of SIGSALY in Washington, and at Eisenhower’sheadquarters in Algiers, also began in the spring of 1943.SIGSALY entered service in mid-July 1943 with a militaryteleconference between London and Washington. 11The latter had extensions to the White House (Roosevelthad decided against installing the main terminal there,knowing Churchill’s working hours) and the Navy buildingon Constitution Avenue. Heavy traffic finally required asecond SIGSALY terminal at the Pentagon. As the AlliesVODER ANDVOCODER: “Atthe 1939 World’sFair, a machinecalled a Voder(far left) emittedrecognizeablespeech when agirl stroked itskeys. No humanvocal cords entered into the procedureat any point; the keys simplycombined some electronicallyproduced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker."—Vannever Bush, As We May Think, 1945.The Vocoder (Voice Operated reCOrDER) developed by Bell Labsphysicist Homer Dudley, combined an analyser with an artificial voice(above right). The analyser detected energy levels of sound samplesmeasured over the audio frequency spectrum by narrow band filters.The results could be viewed graphically as functions of frequencyagainst time.OPERATIONAL:A SIGSALY terminalin 1943 (Wikimedia).The name referredvaguely to SignalCorps terminology.By the end of thewar a dozen terminalssupported 3000top-secret teleconferences.gained ground against Germany, SIGSALY terminals werealso placed in Paris, Frankfurt and, after V-E day, Berlin.In the Pacific, the system was used by 1944 with terminalsin Oakland, Honolulu and Brisbane (Gen.MacArthur’s initial headquarters in Australia). After theirrecapture, systems were set up in Guam (to control B-29raids, including the atomic bomb missions), Manila(MacArthur’s final headquarters), and finally Tokyo. Oneterminal was even aboard a ship, following MacArthur’sisland-hopping campaign. All told, a dozen SIGSALY sitessupported 3000 top-secret teleconferences, chiefly amongmilitary commanders.Churchill himself appears not to have used SIGSALYuntil April 1944, and thereafter only very occasionally,tending to prefer the old-fashioned scrambler, with all itspotential risk. 12 Ruth Ive, one of the high-level telephonemonitors who recently published a book on her experiences,suggests several reasons for this:Aside from the need to enter the War Rooms in theafternoon to use the dedicated telephone room (there wasno link to Downing Street) Ive believes that Roosevelt didnot want to be placed “on the spot,” with no time to considerissues or problems. She also reports that other thanChurchill and Eden, no civilian War Cabinet members orMinistry personnel were authorized. Churchill did useSIGSALY to place his first call to Truman after Roosevelt’sFINEST HOUR 149 / 33

SIGSALY ESSENTIALS: A simplified overview of a one-way transmission.Return transmissions used the same key setup. (NationalSecurity Agency/Central Security Service)TEAMWORK: For special training of SIGSALY operators, the U.S. ArmySignal Corps established the 805th Signal Service Company. Thisspecial company had the highest average grade of any company inWorld War II. (National Security Agency/Central Security Service)SIGSALY...death in April 1945. Two weeks later, they had a two-hourdiscussion concerning tentative German surrender offers—the longest call ever made over SIGSALY equipment. 13AftermathAs the Allies neared victory, the heavy SIGSALY terminalswere gradually removed from service and returned tothe U.S., starting with the Algiers equipment in 1944, asEisenhower had shifted his headquarters to Britain. TheLondon facility was “recovered” on 31 October 1945. 14Since the technology was still unknown to any othernations, the system remained highly secret for three moredecades (two years, indeed, longer than Bletchley Park’scodebreaking role).SIGSALY was first made public in news accounts inmid-1976, when more than thirty Bell Labs patents (manyapplied for between 1941 and 1945) were finally granted. 15The system is recognized today as a technical pioneer for itsinitial use of numerous techniques which are widely used intelecommunications. 16 When the Cabinet War Rooms werebeing prepared for public tours in the 1980s, Bell Labs provideddetailed advice on the SIGSALY telephone set thatappears today in the underground room Churchill used inhis occasional trans-Atlantic talks with Roosevelt. 17Despite continuing secrecy, Bell Labs won several contemporaryawards for its work, including “Best SignalProcessing Technology” in 1946. Since SIGSALY was stillclassified, attendees at the awards ceremony simply had toaccept the verdict of the judges that this was something ofcrucial importance. A.B. Clark, a key player with Bell Labsand by then Director of Research and Development at theNational Security Agency, delivered his acceptance speechover a coded phone line: “Phrt fdygui jfsowria meeqmwuiosn jxolwps fuekswusjnvkci! Thank you!” ,Endnotes1. J. V. Boone and R. R. Peterson. SIGSALY—The Start of theDigital Revolution (Ft. Meade, Maryland: NSA/CSA Center forCryptologic History, 2000). Refer to www. nsa/gov.2. “Secure Speech Transmission,” in M. D. Fagen, ed., A Historyof Engineering and Science in the Bell System: National Service in Warand Peace 1925-1975 (Chicago: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1978), 292.3. Donald Mehl, SIGSALY: The Green Hornet—The World WarII Unbreakable Code for Secret High-Level Telephone Conferences(Kansas City: privately published, 1997), 17. Mehl was one of the SignalCorps officers who worked with SIGSALY during the war.4. Mehl, 15-16. See also Ruth Ive, The Woman Who CensoredChurchill (Stroud: History Press, 2008), 93-100; and “Ruth Ive’s Book,”Finest Hour 141, Winter 2008-09, 7.5. Fagen, 291-312.6. Fagen, 310.7. Mehl, 66-71, quotes many of the relevant letters in this controversy.Ive, 109, describes the Turing visit, but incorrectly identifies him asthe “director” of Bletchley Park, which he never was.8. Patrick Weadon, “The SIGSALY Story,” information sheet (Ft.Meade, Maryland: National Cryptologic Museum, n.d. )9. “Signal Corps Fixed Communications in World War II: SpecialAssignments and Techniques. Washington: Signal Corps HistoricalSection (Project E-10), December 1945,” 33. A copy of this once-secretstudy is in the AT&T/Bell Labs Archives. Thanks to Dr. James Spurlockfor this source.10. The location, access, and use issues were all controversial: seeMehl, 72-77.11. Boone and Petrson, op. cit. See note 1.12. Peter Simpkins, Cabinet War Rooms (London: Imperial WarMuseum, 1983), 58.13. Ive, 114, note 4.14. “Signal Corps Fixed…” Appendix A.15. “Patents issued on WW II Speech Encoding Technique,” inBell Labs News, 16:28:1, 12 July 1976. A list of the patents involved is inFagen, 297.16. Mehl, 51-53 cites several other sources. See also the list offirsts in Boone & Patterson, 3-4.17. T. W. Thatcher, “Notes: Description of SIGSALY TelephoneSet and Its Connections,” 28 February 1984. Copy in AT&T/Bell LabsArchives. Thanks again to Dr. James Spurlock.18. Paul D. Lehrman, “Award Winners from the Dawn of ModernAudio” in Mix, Professional Audio and Music Production, 1 August 2006(http:// mixonline.com).FINEST HOUR 149 / 34

C H U R C H I L L A N D I N T E L L I G E N C EIntelligence Today: What We Can LearnThe Churchill Centre has always tried to avoid suggesting what Churchill would have to sayabout contemporary situations, which would be pure conjecture. But much can be learnedfrom considering similar episodes in Churchill's career, and his responses to them.D A V I D F R E E M A NPARALLELS: Sixtyyears ago. Sovietspies Guy Burgess(left) and DonaldMaclean foundChurchill focusing onwhat mattered.In the summer of 2010 the alleged non-profit websiteWikiLeaks published 77,000 classified documentssnatched from Pentagon computers that related to thewar in Afghanistan. Unredacted, the material included thenames of Afghan informants who had been cooperatingwith Coalition Forces. A Taliban spokesman told The NewYork Times that a commission had been formed “to findout about people who are spying” and report the results to aTaliban court. 1The founder and proprietor of WikiLeaks, 39-year-oldAustralian Julian Assange, remained defiant about his decisionto publish the documents even as AmnestyInternational and Reporters Without Borders joined thePentagon (an unusual combination) in criticizing an actionthat potentially endangers those Afghans whose names werepublished. Other workers at WikiLeaks have publiclybroken with their colleague over his behavior.Mr. Assange is now in serious trouble. The U.S. governmentis weighing a possible prosecution under the 1917Espionage Act, and Australian officials have made it clear toMr. Assange that they will support any such action.Welcomed initially in Sweden, Assange had to leaveStockholm after accusations of sexual assault that could leadto another prosecution. When Finest Hour went to press,Assange was in Switzerland, where he was contemplating anapplication for asylum.What does all this have to do with WinstonChurchill? There are two Churchillian aspects to it, onegeneral and one specific.The preceding articles by Sir Martin Gilbert andDavid Stafford (pages 12-27) show in detail that Churchillvery properly took great care in safeguarding intelligencesources. Whatever the ultimate fate of Mr. Assange, surelythe real concern now must be with determining how it >>__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Professor Freeman (dafreeman@exchange.fullerton.edu) teaches History at California State University Fullerton and is a longtime contributor toFinest Hour. His recent articles include “Churchill and the League of Nations 1934-1939” (FH 147); “A Polemic, Not a History” and “TheFriendship Between Churchill and F.E. Smith” (FH 139); “Did Britain Fail?” (FH 135); and “‘Ungrateful Volcano’: Churchill and the Making of Iraq”(FH 132); as well as numerous book reviews and contributions to “Churchill Proceedings” from his papers at Churchill Conferences.FINEST HOUR 149 / 35

“For Churchill, the real question in 1951 waswhy Burgess and Maclean not only continuedto be employed after 1945...but even receivedpromotion to highly sensitive positions....”INTELLIGENCE TODAY...was possible for his organization to acquire classified materialin the first place.As is so often the case, Churchill’s story provides anexample of a similar breach of security, and how he reactedto it. In the spring of 1951, intelligence officers GuyBurgess and Donald Maclean vanished from Britain. It wasfive years before Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev finallyadmitted that they were in the USSR, but suspicion set inimmediately that Burgess and Maclean had been spying forthe Soviets while employed by the British government.As Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Churchillconcentrated on essentials. The real question, he said, wasnot the motivation or ultimate fate of the traitors. “I don’tthink he was much interested,” recalled his private secretarySir John Colville. “In fact I had to press him to ask theCabinet Office to provide a Note on the incident.” 2That Burgess and Maclean were homosexuals did nottrouble Churchill, except to raise his natural sympathy. Hispersonal private secretary, Sir Anthony Montague Browne,recalled that Churchill felt “homosexuals might indeed be asecurity risk, not so much because they might be subject toblackmail, but because they often feel themselves alien andapart from the mainstream of the country.” 3Nor was there much question as to how Burgess andMaclean had come to be employed by the British governmentin the first place. “Our vetting procedures in thosedays were primitive and sloppy,” recalled Sir Anthony,himself a Foreign Office veteran. During the war, he wrote,“the Soviets had been our involuntary allies, which made iteasier for those concerned to condone a background thatwould later be considered deeply suspect.” 4For Churchill, the real question in 1951 was whyBurgess and Maclean not only continued to be employed bythe British government after 1945, when relations with theSoviet Union dramatically changed, but even received promotionto highly sensitive positions that should havetriggered assessments of their job performances up to thattime. Burgess in particular was long notorious in Whitehallfor his alcohol-induced indiscretions.Seeking an answer to Churchill’s key point, PeterThorneycroft put down a question in the House ofCommons for the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, on9 July 1951. Morrison attempted to evade the issue of whenthe traitors received postwar promotions by stating theGovernment had no awareness of the two men having anyCommunist associations at the time they received their originalappointments to the Foreign Office: October 1935 forMaclean and June 1944 for Burgess.Churchill intervened to say that Morrison had notanswered Thorneycroft’s question. On what dates, herepeated, had Burgess and Maclean received their postwarappointments? Morrison continued to prevaricate soChurchill pressed harder. When Morrison merely repeatedthe dates of the original appointments, Churchill beganmoving in for the kill: “We must all profit by the advice ofthe Rt. Hon. Gentleman. He has given two dates: why canhe not give the other two?”The Foreign Secretary foolishly responded with thelegalistic defense that Thorneycroft’s original question assubmitted in writing asked for no such dates. Churchill, ofcourse, had been Prime Minister, and Morrison HomeSecretary, in the wartime coalition when the employment ofMaclean had continued and Burgess had first received hisown appointment. Churchill waved this aside with theobservation that “failures may always occur,” but that didnot mean that Morrison could then “shuffle off all responsibility”and “not give the other two dates,” that is, thosefrom the postwar period.Morrison, however, stuck to his legalistic guns andChurchill closed the trap: “Will the Rt. Hon. Gentlemangive the dates of these two specific appointments if aQuestion is put on the Order Paper?”Having painted himself into a corner, the ForeignSecretary was forced to capitulate: “If a Question is on theOrder Paper I shall be most happy to answer it.” 5As Leader of the Opposition, Churchill had theresponsibility to force the Government to attend to thepoint that really mattered: determining when and why therehad been a failure in security. Only this could lead to theconstructive reforms necessary to prevent future recurrences.Historians naturally concentrate on Churchill’s timeas a Cabinet minister and his opposition to Appeasementduring his Wilderness Years. In this episode, though, we seethat late in his career and in a very different sort of parliamentaryrole, Churchill still had the capacity to look pastthe sensational and focus on what was most important. Inso doing he discharged his responsibilities to the nationwhile maintaining the highest standards of the Mother ofParliaments. ,Endnotes1. “WikiLeaks Founder on the Run,” The New York Times,23 October 2010.2. David Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (New York:Overlook Press, 1997), 333.3. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset London:Cassell, 1995), 219-20.4. Ibid., 61.5. Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), House of Commons,9 July 1951, cols. 33-34.FINEST HOUR 149 / 36

W I T A N D W I S D O M“UnsinkableAircraft Carrier”It floats around the Internet that according to Churchill,Britain served in the Second World War as an “unsinkableaircraft carrier.” The phrase does not however trackto Churchill.John Charmley, in Churchill’s Grand Alliance: TheAnglo-American Special Relationship 1940-1957 (NewYork: Harcourt, 1995) appropriated the line for his own inarguing that Britain served American interests by lendingterritory for American air bases. Laurence Thompson, in1940 (New York: Morrow, 1966), used the phrase earlier,declaring that Germany’s defeat would not have been possiblewithout UK bases. But neither was the originator.The “unsinkable” remark stems rather from theMemoirs of General Ismay (New York: Viking, 1960),WSC’s chief of staff. Writing of U.S. forces gathering inEngland before D-Day, Ismay writes amusingly of the mistakenmeaning of a word in a radio broadcast (p. 350):…the American forces identifiedthemselves whole-heartedly with localinterest. In one village they subscribedmost generously to funds forrebuilding a church which had beenheavily bombed. The work was completedsome years after the end of thewar, and the Re-dedication Servicewas broadcast and relayed to America.The general who had commanded thetroops in that area was an interestedlistener, but he blew up in fury when he heard the bishopobserve, in the course of his address, how fortunate they hadbeen in having the “succour from America.” He switched offabruptly, vowing that never again would he do anything forsuch so-and-sos. The British Isles had already proved agigantic—and unsinkable—aircraft-carrier. They now had tofulfill the additional role of a gigantic ordnance depot.Greatest Man in the World?Current discussion about the younger generation (See“Datelines…The Youth Vote,” page 8) brings to mind thestory about a child who allegedly confronted Churchill atChartwell and asked something like this: “Are you thegreatest man in the world?” Churchill allegedly replied,“Yes I am. Now bugger off.” Is it true?—STAN A. ORCHARD, VIA EMAILEditor’s response: Yes. From our report on the Houseof Commons Churchill Dinner, 2 June 1990, the editor’smaiden (and only) speech; Finest Hour 67:Iam honored to be asked to speak here, something I couldhave never have imagined, knowing that such honors arefleeting, remembering the time Sir Winston was shootingpheasants on the estate of the old Duke of Westminster.“How many did you shoot?” the Duke asked him.“Four,” Churchill replied.“Indeed,” said the Duke, “Then you’ve shot enough,and I will have your carriage ordered for tomorrowmorning.”So before my carriage is summoned, I would like toshare with you the excitement that has engulfed theInternational Churchill Societies during this memorableanniversary year. [A long report on Churchill Society activitiesfollowed.]We are always amazed at the numbers of young peoplewho join us, who have so early in life come to know himeither through his writings or by the endless stories abouthim. One of these, only eighteen, told us recently what firstgot him interested. (So many of these stories are apocryphal;perhaps Lady Soames will tell us if it’s true.)A schoolboy at Chartwell, eluding all security, foundhimself in Sir Winston’s bedroom, the occupant proppedup, riffling through the newspapers and puffing an enormouscigar.“My papa says you’re the greatest man in the world,”offered the boy. “Is it true?”Sir Winston peered at him over his spectacles andsaid, “Of course—now buzz off.”Now I am told that in fact he used a rather moreearthy phrase than that. But in deference to my surroundingsI have done a little editing.P.S.: Lady Soames tells me it’s true. [Privately she saidthat the questioner was none other than her son Nicholas,now an MP in his own right.]He certainly was the greatest man in the world for thelongest time, and his truth, in the words of the Americanhymn he loved, goes marching on. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 37

75 Years AgoWinter 1935-36 • Age 61“More stags than Tories”This winter proved as bad forChurchill’s political career as itwas for the peace of Europe.Churchill was in Barcelona whena political storm broke over the Hoare-Laval Pact between Britain, France andItaly, conceived by the anti-Nazi SirRobert Vansittart, whereby Abyssiniawas to surrender 20 percent of its territoryto the invading Italians. It wasinitially supported by Prime MinisterBaldwin and the Cabinet, but publicopinion forced them to back down. Asa result, Samuel Hoare resigned asforeign secretary and was replaced byAnthony Eden on 23 December.Churchill took no position publiclyon the Hoare-Laval Pact but hispostwar memoirs suggest some sympathyfor Vansittart’s rationale, i.e.,that Germany was a greater danger, andthat having Italy as a friend was in bothcountries’ strategic interest. Churchillwas unimpressed with Eden’s appointment,having preferred AustenChamberlain. As he wrote to his wifeon 8 January: “I think you will now seewhat a light-weight Eden is.”While Clementine returnedhome from Barcelona for Christmas atChartwell, Churchill went to Tangierand from there to Marrakesh, where hespent four days with Lloyd George.Writing to his wife on the aftermath ofthe Hoare-Laval affair, he was pessimistic:“We are getting into the mostterrible position, involved definitely byhonour & by contract in almost anyquarrel that can break out in Europe,our defences neglected, ourGovernment less capable a machine forconducting affairs than I have everseen. The Baldwin-MacDonald regimehas hit this country very hard indeed,and may well be the end of its glories.”That same day brought more badnews: His son Randolph accepted thelocal Conservative Party’s request tostand as a candidate in a Scottish byelectionin Ross and Cromarty againstRamsay MacDonald’s son Malcolm, acabinet minister in the NationalGovernment. Churchill had mistakenlythought that his son would decline outof deference to his father’s hopes for acabinet post. As he had earlier writtenhis wife, “it would put a spoke in mywheel & do nothing good for him..”He was disappointed over his son’sdecision, because his enemies in theConservative Party automaticallyassumed that WSC was responsible.His slim prospects for a cabinet positionwere diminished accordingly.In the event, Randolph had nohope of winning. As Brendan Brackenwired to Churchill in late January:“Randolph’s prospects very doubtful.Socialist win probable. More stags thanTories in Cromarty.”In mid-January, Churchill predictedto his wife that Hitler’s nextmove would be to occupy the demilitarizedRhineland, in violation of theVersailles Treaty. On 15 January, Japanwithdrew from the London NavalDisarmament Conference, refusing toaccept any limits on its Navy. WSCwrote to his wife on January 17th:“The Naval Conference has of coursecollapsed. Japan has ruptured it....Meanwhile Japan is seeking moreprovinces of China. Already more thanhalf of their whole budget is spentupon armaments. Those figures Iquoted about German expenditure onarmaments are being admitted in thepress to be only too true. One mustconsider these two predatory militarydictatorship nations, Germany andJapan, as working in accord.”In early March, the BritishGovernment issued a Defence WhitePaper which Churchill praised. OnMarch 7th, Hitler fulfilled Churchill’sJanuary prediction and sent troops intothe Rhineland. The British refused tosupport France’s request to mobilizeagainst the German actions and tobring Hitler’s violations of theVersailles Treaty to the League ofNations. And, when German foreignminister Ribbentrop said on March13th that Germany desired to cooperatein a peaceful manner in buildinga new Europe, Britain’s new foreignsecretary, Anthony Eden, issued a notewelcoming Germany’s statement—confirmingChurchill’s doubtful view ofhim in December.On March 14th, Prime MinisterBaldwin announced the creation of anew cabinet position, Minister for theCoordination of Defence. To no one’ssurprise, including his own, Churchilldid not receive the appointment. Itwent to the distinctly unqualifiedAttorney-General, Sir Thomas Inskip.The most apt comment on thisappointment was by Churchill’s friendProfessor Lindemann (in MartinGilbert’s Winston S. Churchill, volume5): “The most cynical thing that hasbeen done since Caligula appointed hishorse as Consul.”50 Years AgoWinter 1960-61 • Age 86“...I will not press it too far”Churchill spent Christmas and theNew Year at Chartwell, havingwritten earlier to his lifelong friendConsuelo Balsan, once Duchess ofMarlborough, about the recent electionof President Kennedy, with whomChurchill had exchanged post-electionmessages.On January 10th Churchill wroteto French President Charles de Gaullecongratulating him on recent favorableevents in France and Algeria: TheAlgerian referendum, Churchill wrote,“is, if I may say so, a triumph of yourpolicies and for you personally. It isheartening to see that the Frenchpeople continue so rightly to expresstheir confidence in you.”In March, Churchill again joinedAristotle Onassis on his yachtChristina, and on the 20th (as MartinGilbert writes in his volume 8), WSCpainstakingly wrote his wife in his ownhand for the first time in nearly twoyears, something his strokes had previouslykept him from doing:“Here is a line to keep us postedin my own handwriting—all donemyself! And to tell you how much Ilove you: We have travelled ceaselesslyover endless seas—quite smoothly forweeks on end and now here we are—within a few days of meeting Ari andhis family. This is the moment for meto show you that I still possess the giftof writing & continue to use it. But Iwill not press it too far.” ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 39

C O V E R S T O R YWhen the Twain Met:Winston Churchill and Samuel ClemensC H R I S T O P H E RS C H W A R ZAmid the endless accounts of noted personalitieswho crossed paths with Winston Churchill, oneof the best-known anecdotes involves his briefencounter with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) at theWaldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City at the turn ofthe 20th century. In future years Churchill would fondlyremember Twain’s “noble air.” 1 The meeting was a bitmore contentious and uncomfortable than he later let on.Though they shared the same birthday, November 30th,their experiences over the previous year had much to dowith their initial uneasiness with each other.Churchill, the young war correspondent andsometime soldier, had risen to prominence in 1900, followinghis daring escape during the Boer War and subsequentelection to Parliament on the crest of his fame. Inan effort to secure his financial future and bankroll hispolitical career, Churchill toured England that autumn,and then took on a grueling speaking tour of NorthAmerica that would last into the new year.Winston’s mother, Lady Randolph Churchill,did her best to introduce him to the right people inAmerica. One, five years before, was her friend BourkeCockran; now in 1900, Jennie interceded again:She particularly enjoyed meeting visiting Americanauthors and repeated with glee a story about herfriend Mark Twain. At a London gathering he askedMrs. J. Comyns-Carr, “You are an American, aren’tyou?” Mrs. Carr explained that she was of Englishstock and had been brought up in Italy. “Ah, that’sit,” Twain answered. “It’s your complexity of backgroundthat makes you seem American. We arerather a mixture, of course. But I can pay you nohigher compliment than to mistake you for a countrymanof mine.” 2During his travels, the man who would becomethe quintessential Englishman of the 20th century met_______________________________________________Mr. Schwarz attended the 2006 Churchill Institute at Ashland University.He has taught history at Niles West High School, Skokie, Illinois,for twenty years, and designed the school’s semester-long course onWorld War II. His article on Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s second-incommand,appeared in Chicago magazine in August 2008.his American counterpart from the 19th. While Twainwas one of Churchill’s childhood heroes, the meetingwould not go as well as the starry-eyed young Briton hadhoped. When they met in 1900, their physical differencescould not have appeared more stark. Twain, in thewaning years of a nearly-five-decade writing career, possesseda universally recognized shock of white hair andwas quite possibly the most famous man on the planet.Churchill, just beginning a political career that wouldlast more than sixty years and win him global fame, wasmuch younger, with already thinning hair and a somewhatfrail appearance. One report described him as “avery fair man of the purely English type. His face denotesa highly strung temperament and the broad brow considerablemental capacity.” 3 He looked more like an ivorytower professor than a daring escape artist, soldier, frontlinewar correspondent and newly minted hero of theBritish Empire. Their differences, though, extended farbeyond appearance.At sixty-five, Twain was enjoying a resurgence ofcelebrity. He had just returned from a nine-year self-imposedexile in Europe, financially and emotionally fit andsecure in his reputation. The only thing that really irritatedhim was what he saw as the burgeoning empire ofthe United States. He was embarked on an anti-imperialistcrusade that would occupy the last ten years of his life.Nor would the foreign policy of his homeland be the solefocus of his vitriol: he was quite willing to lambaste otherimperialist nations as well.In the weeks leading up to the banquet he declared,“I am a Boxer!,” supporting the Chinese in theBoxer Rebellion, and expressed sympathy for SouthAfrican natives rather than Boers or Englishman embroiledin the war there. 4On December 9th, Churchill held a press conferenceat Everett House, New York City, and MarkTwain himself showed up to ask the questions. Churchillwasted no time in disarming his interlocutor:Twain: “It has been related that a Dutch maidenfell in love with you and assisted you to flee. You havesaid that it was the hand of Providence. Which is true?”FINEST HOUR 149 / 40

Churchill: “It is sometimes the same thing.”Twain: “How long do you think the war inSouth Africa will last?”Churchill: “The war is over now. The Boers arewhipped, but do not know it….Gradually, as the conflictingelements become reconciled, a system of autonomousgovernment must be introduced, until at last the coloniesbecome as independent of the British Crown as Canada.The Boer is a splendid fighter and the coolest man underfire I have ever seen. He is what you might call a ‘lowpressure’fighter. He never gets excited, and as long as hethinks he is going to win he will stay at his post.” 5Overwhelmed by the star power of the newly-returnedMark Twain, unfazed by his fierce antiimperialistrhetoric and probably coaxed byLady Randolph, the literati of New York invited him tointroduce the new hero of the British Empire at his firstspeech, four days later at the Waldorf Astoria. To some itmust have seemed like inviting William Jennings Bryanto introduce William McKinley.Churchill, just turned twenty-six, was a proudcitizen of the most powerful country in the world. Hehoped his visit to New York would be as exciting as hisfirst, five years earlier, on the eve of his coverage of theCuban rebellion against Spain. While he had reason tothink that his lectures would be well-received—he’d beena smash across Great Britain and was half-American bybirth—he appeared nervous as he waited to give his wellrehearsedspeech to the New York audience. Given theevents of the past few days, he had cause for worry.Churchill was aware that he did not have theunanimous support of the committee hosting his appearance.The New York Times had reported that antiimperialistson the committee openly opposed invitinghim. Some, including the mayor of New York and thepresident of Princeton University, went so far as to requestthat their names not appear in the program. WhenChurchill’s tour agent failed to remove their names itcaused a stir on the eve of the lecture. 6The possibility of a hostile reception must havecrossed his mind as he sat on the dais. And yet he wastouched by the presence of Twain, whose Tom Sawyerand Huckleberry Finn had enthralled him as a boy: >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 41

WHEN THE TWAIN MET...“I was thrilled by this famous companion of my youth.He was now very old and snow-white, and combinedwith a noble air a most delightful style of conversation.” 7While Churchill knew that he did not have theunanimous support of the committee, he was possiblyunaware of Twain’s very public campaign against colonization.He soon learned the truth. Twain began with asearing critique of British and U.S. policy abroad, but hechanged tack at the end, introducing the young Winstonwith panache:I think that England sinned when she got herselfinto a war in South Africa which she could haveavoided, just as we have sinned in getting into asimilar war in the Philippines. Mr. Churchill by hisfather is an Englishman, by his mother he is anAmerican, no doubt a blend that makes the perfectman. England and America; we are kin. And nowthat we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more tobe desired. The harmony is perfect, like Mr.Churchill himself, whom I now have the honor topresent to you. 8Clearly Churchill knew he was not in Englandnow! But he soon warmed to his task, and “held the attentionof his listeners by a clear recital of some of themost striking episodes of the struggle between Boer andBriton,” according to the Times:He showed nervousness at first, but soon forgothimself in his subject, and held the attention of hislisteners....A touch of humor, introduced halfunconsciously, lightened up the lecture considerably.He took his audience from the armored trainnear Estcourt to the POW compound in Pretoria,from the railroad line at Resana Garcia to the hero’swelcome at Durban. He took them and he heldthem. 9 Already a practiced debater, Churchill had theability to defuse pro-Boer and anti-British feelings. Duringhis lectures in America, he often showed a magiclantern slide of a Boer commando. When, frequently, hisaudience responded with applause, Churchill would say:“You are quite right to applaud him; he is the most formidablefighting man in the world—one of the heroes ofhistory.” 10 When Churchill finished, Twain took thepodium again. The New York Times reported:“I take it for granted [Twain said] that I have thepermission of this audience to thank the lecturer forhis discourse, and to thank him heartily that, whilehe has extolled British valor, he has not withheldpraise from Boer valor.” A flushed and happy“You are right toapplaud him; he isthe most formidablefighting man in theworld—one of theheroes of history.”—WSC disarming pro-Boer audienceswho applauded his slide of a Boercommando on his U.S. lecture tour.Winston replied with becoming humility: “It is mychief duty to thank the chairman for coming here togive my lecture an importance and a dignity whichit could not have otherwise obtained.” 11While newspapers reported the New York receptionas “cordial,” Churchill gamely debated Twain in aprivate conversation. Biographer William Manchesterwrites that Churchill “growled” a retort, 12 but Churchillhimself did not recall the exchange the same way:Of course we argued about the war. After someinterchanges I found myself beaten back to thecitadel “My country right or wrong.” “Ah,” said theold gentleman, “When the poor country is fightingfor its life, I agree. But this was not your case.” Ithink however I did not displease him; for he wasgood enough at my request to sign every one of thethirty volumes of his works for my benefit; and inthe first volume he inscribed the following maximintended, I daresay, to convey a gentle admonition:“To do good is noble; to teach others to do good isnobler, and no trouble.” 13Perhaps when Churchill wrote this thirty yearslater, he was waxing nostalgic; or perhaps he’d been hardenedby years of House of Commons debate. At the time,however, their meeting seems to have been polite at best,with no sign of a deeper bond developing between them.It was the kind of meeting that diplomats like to describeas “a frank exchange of views.”Churchill’s tour through the U.S. would continueinto January 1901. He would describe his audiencesas “cool and critical” but also “good natured,” andthey listened to him in “quiet tolerance.” 14 He had morecordial receptions in Canada afterward, and returned toEngland in late winter satisfied with his performancesFINEST HOUR 149 / 42

and earnings, ready to begin his career as a Member ofParliament. In the meantime, Mark Twain turned his fullattention to anti-imperialist polemics.Perhaps the impact of the meeting on Churchillcan best be seen in his swiftly-changing attitudes aboutthe Boer War. WSC’s maiden speech in Parliament, just afew months after his tour, was on British policy in SouthAfrica, in which he advocated a conciliatory approach tothe Boers. In 1904, as he contemplated bolting the Conservativesfor the Liberal party, he railed against Britishimperial policy and called the war “a public disaster.” 15Had he heard that speech, Twain would likely have ledthe applause for the now-renegade Conservative.The two men never met again and last year markedthe centenary of Twain’s death. But Churchill didnot forget the great novelist. As Martin Gilbert revealsin the official biography, Churchill joined the InternationalMark Twain Society in 1929, and suggested thatTwain’s The Prince and the Pauper be one of the “GreatStories Retold” which he and his secretary, Eddie Marsh,were preparing for the press. 16Twain’s work was always in Churchill’s mind.In 1932, when his second appearance on an interruptedlecture tour brought him to Twain’s longtime home ofHartford, Connecticut, WSC declared the city “the centreof the great Mark Twain literature that has flowed outand is still flowing over all the English-speaking peoplesaround the entire globe.” 17In “Everybody’s Language,” a 1935 essay onCharlie Chaplin (FH 142), Churchill wrote of howChaplin, like himself, had a parent who died young,adding: “Mark Twain, left fatherless at twelve, had substantiallythe same experience. He would never have writtenHuckleberry Finn had life been kinder in his youth.” 18Nineteen thirty-seven found Churchill proposingMark Twain among the personages for a sequel to hisbook of character studies, Great Contemporaries. 19 Thatsame year, the Twain Society’s founder, Cyril Clemens, adescendant of the novelist, presciently wrote Churchill:“Your Marlborough is so magnificent that we feel it deservesthe Nobel Prize in Literature.” 20 In due course,Marlborough would play a powerful role in qualifyingChurchill for that award.Finally, on 25 October 1943, Churchill wroteClemens from Downing Street:I am writing to express my thanks to theInternational Mark Twain Society for their GoldMedal, which has been handed to me by Mr. PhilipGuedalla. It will serve to keep fresh my memory ofa great American, who showed me much kindnesswhen I visited New York as a young man by takingthe Chair at my first public lecture and by autographingcopies of his works, which still form avalued part of my library. 21 >>Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York, 13 December 1900:“ I have already written a book about my escape from Pretoria and I trust thateveryone in the audience will purchase a copy. This is the anniversary of my escape,many accounts of which have been related here and in England, but none of which istrue. I escaped by climbing over the iron paling of my prison while the sentry waslighting his pipe. I passed through the streets of Pretoria unobserved andmanaged to board a coal train on which I hid among the sacks of coal.When I found the train was not going in the direction I wanted, I jumped off.I wandered about aimlessly for a long time, suffering from hunger, and at last Idecided that I must seek aid at all risks. I knocked at the door of a kraal, expectingto find a Boer, and to my joy, found it occupied by an Englishman,who ultimately helped me to reach the British lines.”—Extract, Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), I: 63.FINEST HOUR 149 / 43

Twain aged 72, in the robes of Oxford, where he receivedan Honorary Doctor of Literature degree in 1907.Churchill aged 69, in the robes of Harvard, where hereceived an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1943.WHEN THE TWAIN MET...In truth, both Churchill and Twain had much more incommon in their world view than they realized duringtheir brief, awkward encounter. Perhaps if they wereboth in the twilight of their careers at the time they met,and had enjoyed a talk late into the evening (among thefavorite pastimes of both), they might have becomefriends rather than passing acquaintances.And that would have been just fine with MarkTwain. At the Pilgrims Society in London, one of themany receptions that marked his final visit to England in1907, he said: “…praise is well, compliment is well, butaffection—that is the last and final and most precious rewardthat any man can win.” 22Winston Churchill would have liked that. ,Endnotes1. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (London:Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 375.2. Ralph Martin, Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, 2vols. (London: Cassell, 1971), vol. 2, The Dramatic Years1896-1921, 234.3. Robert Pilpel, Churchill in America 1894-1961:An Affectionate Portrait (New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,1976), 40.4. Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: FreePress, 2005), 604.5. “Fighters Must Act for Themselves,” Press Conference,Everett House, New York, in Robert Rhodes James, ed.,Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), I: 62.6. “How Lieut. Churchill Escaped from the Boers,”The New York Times, 13 December 1900. Randolph S.Churchill, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume IPart 2 1896-1900 (London: Heinemann, 1967), 1221.7. Churchill, My Early Life, 375-76.8. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, vol.1 Youth 1874-1900 (London: Heinemann, 1966), 542-43.9. Pilpel, Churchill in America, 40.10. Ted Morgan. Churchill: The Rise to Failure1874-1915 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983) 154-55.11. The New York Times, 13 December 1900; Pilpel,Churchill in America, 40.12. William Manchester, The Last Lion: WinstonChurchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (Boston: Little, Brownand Co., 1983) 332.13. Churchill, My Early Life, 375-76.14. Ibid.15. Manchester, Visions of Glory, 363.16. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, CompanionVolume V, Part 2: Documents, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (London: Heinemann, 1981), 500.17. Ibid., 398, note 1.18. Winston S. Churchill: “Everybody’s Language,”Collier’s, 26 October 1935, reprinted in The Collected Essaysof Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of ImperialHistory, 1975), vol. 3, Churchill and People, 247; and inFinest Hour 142, Spring 2009, 22-26.19. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, CompanionVolume 5, Part 3: Documents: The Coming of War 1936-1939 (London: Heinemann, 1982), 381.20. Ibid., 776.21. Ibid., note 1.22. “Guest of the Pilgrims,” The Times, London, 26June 1907.FINEST HOUR 149 / 44

E D U C A T I O N“Winston Churchill and theAnglo-American Relationship,” 2010A three-week summer institute for teachers on July 11th-30th, directed by ChurchillCentre Academic Chairman James W. Muller, University of Alaska, Anchorage, wasfunded by the National Endowment for the HumanitiesS U Z A N N E S I G M A NPhotographs by Eileen Bach, Genie Burke, Joe Gianetto, Brian Powers, Suzanne Wooten and the AuthorMrs. Sigman is the Churchill Centre’s Educational Programs CoordinatorTwenty-four high school teachers attended The Churchill Centre’s third summer institute funded by theNational Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Muller, TCC Chief Operating Officer Daniel Myersand this writer selected participants from a large number of applications submitted in spring 2010. TheInstitute was a great success, and teachers returned home with a broadened understanding of Churchill, World WarII and the “Special Relationship” that will benefit their teaching, lesson planning and curricula. >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 45

,E D U C A T I O NJames Muller's past experience with the Archives was aided by the endless assistance and courtesy offered byArchives Director Allen Packwood and his staff. Mr. Packwood was truly the lynchpin in our teachers’research experience. After their training and their work in the files, teachers earned an Archives Centre ------Reader’s Card, entitling them to return for further research in the future. Joining Muller and Packwood werelecturers including Kevin Theakston, University of Leeds; Richard Overy, University of Exeter; and author, journalistand broadcaster Max Hastings. Addressing the wartime relationship between Churchill and FranklinRoosevelt were David Woolner of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Institute; Piers Brendon, Churchill biographer andformer Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre; and Celia Sandys, Sir Winston Churchill’s granddaughter and aChurchill Centre Trustee. The vast array of site visits included Bletchley Park Cryptology Museum, Sir Winston’sbirthplace Blenheim Palace, his country home Chartwell, and his boyhood school Harrow. In London we visitedthe Houses of Parliament, Westminster Hall, the Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum.Left: Director Allen Packwood began by offering teachers a personal tour of the massive Churchill Archives Centre, the heart of Churchill researchworldwide. Right: Eileen Bach, who teaches in Shanghai, China, developed a PowerPoint presentation on the Churchill Archives Centre, and shared itwith participants and organizers on our Google Group site, which began operating in April and will continue indefinitely.Above: Our first outing was to the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in Madingley, outside Cambridge, sited on 30.5 acres donated by CambridgeUniversity. The Cemetery contains the remains of 3812 World War II American military dead; 5127 additional names are recorded on the Tabletsof the Missing, where rosettes mark names of those personnel since recovered and identified. Most of them died in the Battle of the Atlantic or in thestrategic bombardment of Germany. Right: Bob Faubel and Genie Burke assist our outstanding guide, Arthur Brooks, in lowering the flag at Taps.FINEST HOUR 149 / 46

Above: Well-preparedwith advance materials,teachers lookedforward to each of the90-minute seminarsessions. Left: Somuch fun to hold asession in the Old HarrovianRoom at HarrowSchool. Right:Following his presentationand questionsand answers, MaxHastings, author of thehighly regarded 2009book Finest Years:Churchill as Warlord,1940-45,signs acopy for Joe Gianetto.Below left: Leanne Dumais and Joe Gianetto chat with guest lecturer Professor Kevin Theakston, who led sessions on “The British Political Systemand Churchill” and “Was Churchill a Good Prime Minister?” Theakston, who teaches British Government at the University of Leeds, is the author ofsix books, including Winston Churchill and the British Constitution, and an expert on the assessment of prime ministers. Below right: Outside theArchives Centre with Celia Sandys (center front in sweater) after presentation and Q&A on “The Lighter Side of Churchill.”Teachers anonymously evaluated their three-week experience on the NEH website, and the following commentwas representative: “The Archives sessions were superlative....Allen Packwood’s enthusiasm and knowledgewere exceptional. His ability to assist each of us in an incredibly welcoming, engaging and helpful mannerallowed participants to navigate through what seemed like a massively overwhelming task: conducting research inthe Churchill papers. A fine host as well as a vital part of this program, he made everyone feel useful and gave usthe help and encouragement we needed to get started on our research. I loved his initial presentation as well as hiscolleague’s talk about preserving archives documents. I hope to return and make further use of the archives.” >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 47

E D U C A T I O NBelow: We enjoyed three meals a day in the Churchill College dining hall. Theesteemed historian Richard Overy (third back on the right), joined us for lunch afterleading seminar sessions on “Churchill’s Strategy from Rearmament to D-Day” and“Churchill and the Aeroplane: Battle of Britain and Bombing.” Professor Overyteaches history at the University of Exeter, where he also serves as Director of theCentre for the Study of War, State and Society. Right: Despite the busy schedule,there was time to relax on the Churchill College grounds and in the Buttery.Communications between teachers and organizers began on a Google discussion group in mid-April and willcontinue indefinitely. Many postings testify to the value of the experience. August 26th: “Hope you arehaving a good start to the school year. See the August 30th New Yorker for an interesting comparison ofAmerican and British views on Churchill.” September 3rd: “Just wanted to let you all know that I did my lessonplan (a seminar on four of Churchill’s post-World War II speeches) today in my Cold War Politics classes. It wasawesome to see the work come to life, but much more impressive to see how excited and into the whole thing thekids were. I guess my enthusiasm was infectious. I introduced the seminar and did the background lecture earlier inthe week and, ever since, have called my students ‘Young Churchillians’—which they love.”In summary, as one teacher wrote, “This was an amazing experience. Through the readings, discussions,research, guest lecturers and field trips, I gained new insight into Churchill and World War II. As a teacher, I feel itis important to be a lifelong student. There is a misnomer that history is an unchanging, stagnant subject; newscholarship is always occurring which can and does alter our understanding of the past. It is important that highschool teachers are part of this ‘conversation,’ that they have access to the most up-to-date understanding. After all,we are the ones conveying information to the next generation. The Institute was an amazing way for high schoolteachers to be brought into the academic dialogue, enabling us to bring it back to our classrooms.” ,Bletchley Park: Greeted by Sir Winston himself (below), we saw thewonderful collection of Jack Darrah, a lifetime’s work and still growing(with Jim Muller and the author, left), and piled into a vintage call box.

Above left: We were awed by plaque on the floor of Westminster Hall, whereChurchill’s coffin lay in state, seen during a tour of Parliament arranged byNicholas Soames MP and his gracious assistant, Corinne Conrath. Left: PhilReed welcomes teachers to the Cabinet War Room. Churchill’s chair, at centerrear in front of map, is left vacant. Above: Arriving at Blenheim Palace.ParticipantsEileen Bach, Concordia International School, Shanghai, China • Courtney Beitler, H.B. Plant High School, Tampa, Fla.Genie Burke, Greenhill School, Addison, Texas • Clarissa Bushman, Stuyvesant High School, New York, N.Y.Paul Clark, Wausau East High School, Wausau, Wis. • Leanne Dumais, Rickover Naval Academy, Chicago, Ill.Robert W. Faubel, DeWitt Clinton High School, Bronx, N.Y.Joseph Gianetto, Maple Avenue Middle School, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.Jonathan Greiner, Lawrence School, Brookline, Mass. • Troy Hoehne, Aviation High School, Des Moines, Wash.Catherine J. Holden, Franklin High School, Reisterstown, Md. • Ben Kaplan, Gateway School, New York, N.Y.James Kravontka, Newington High School, Newington, Conn. • Mera Kriz, North Quincy High School, Quincy, Mass.Arnold Mansdorf, High School of American Studies, Bronx, N.Y.Karalyn McGrorty, Mount St. Joseph Academy, Flourtown, Penna.Elizabeth Montgomery, Cherry Creek High School, Englewood, Colo. • Sara Olds, Summit Academy Jr. High, Draper, UtahBrian Powers, Willink Middle School, Webster, N.Y. • Maritza A. Salazar, James A. Garfield High School, Los Angeles, Calif.Kevin Semelsberger, Sunnyslope High School, Phoenix, Ariz. • Robert Simpson, Penncrest High School, Media, Penna.Lyn Tillett, Christ School, Arden, N.C. • Suzanne Wooten, Deer Valley Middle School, Phoenix, Ariz.Enjoying the cuisine at our farewell dinner, sponsored by The Churchill Centreat Ciao Bella, near our London accommodations at Goodenough College,Mecklenburgh Square. Teachers left knowing this was not the end, or even thebeginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning.FINEST HOUR 149 / 49

Books, Arts& CuriositiesChurchill Centre Book ClubManaged for the Centre by ChartwellBooksellers (www.churchillbooks.com),which offers member discounts up to25%. To order please contactChartwell Booksellers, 55 East 52ndStreet, New York, NY 10055.Email info@chartwellbooksellers.comTelephone (212) 308-0643Facsimile (212) 838-7423Absent Churchill, India’s 1943 Famine Would Have Been WorseARTHUR HERMANChurchill’s Secret War: The BritishEmpire and the Ravaging of IndiaDuring World War II, by MadhusreeMukerjee. Basic Books, 368 pp.,$28.95, Member price $23.95.Voltaire said the problem with theHoly Roman Empire was that it wasneither holy nor Roman nor an Empire.One could say of Churchill’s Secret Warthat it is neither secret nor a war, nor hasit much to do with Churchill.Ms. Mukerjee, who writes forScientific American and is no historian,has gotten herself entangled in three separateand contentious issues: Britain’sbattle with Indian nationalists likeGandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose;Churchill’s often tempestuous views onIndia; and the 1943-44 Bengal famine.Out of them she attempts to build aplausible cause-and-effect narrative. Allshe manages is to mangle the factsregarding all three, doing a disservice toboth historical and moral truth.In mid-October 1942 a devastatingcyclone ripped through the coastalregions of east Bengal (today lowerBangladesh), killing thousands and decimatingthe autumn rice crop. Rice thatshould have been planted was insteadconsumed. When hot weather arrived inMay 1943, the rice crop was a fraction ofnormal for Bengal’s peasantry, who hadspent centuries living near starvation.Turning bad news into disasterwere the Japanese, who had just overrunBurma, the main source of India’s riceimports. Within a month, the entiresoutheastern subcontinent faced starvation.The governments in New Delhiand Bengal were unprepared, and as theheat grew, people began to die. It wasthe greatest humanitarian crisis the Rajhad faced in more than half a century.One might blame the disaster onthe Japanese, but there were other problemsof India’s own making. Many localofficials were either absent (Bengal’s governorfell ill and died), distracted by theeruption of Bose’s Quit India movement;or simply too slow and corrupt toreact. Bengal’s Muslim majority ministrydid nothing, while many of its Hindumembers were making huge profitstrading in rice during the shortage.Finally, the magnitude of what was happeningdid not reach the attention ofLondon until it was too late.No Churchill critic, not even Ms.Mukerjee, has yet found a way to blameChurchill for actually triggering thefamine—in the way that, for example,Stalin caused the famine in the Ukraineor Mao the mass starvations duringChina’s “Great Leap Forward.” Instead,the claim is that Churchill’s callous racist_____________________________________Mr. Herman, a Visiting Scholar at the AmericanEnterprise Institute, is the author of Gandhi &Churchill nominated for the 2009 PulitzerPrize, reviewed in Finest Hour 138.FINEST HOUR 149 / 50attitudes, developed in 1890s India andtypical of the British imperialist elite,blinded him to the suffering and led himto make decisions that prolonged andaggravated the death toll. This includeddeliberately halting shipments of foodthat might have relieved the suffering,while insisting that food exports fromIndia to Britain continue despite afamine that by mid-October 1943 waskilling 2000 a month in Calcutta.Today, of course, no accusationagainst a statesman carries more gravitythan that of racism. But Churchill’sposition in 1943 needs to be appreciatedbefore we begin accusing him—asMukerjee does—of war crimes.During that crucial summer, theAnglo-Americans had just managed toprevail in the U-boat war, althoughneither Churchill nor Roosevelt yetknew how decisively. (See pages 24-26.)Germany had suffered a decisive setbackat Kursk on the Eastern Front, Japan atGuadalcanal, but both remained deadlyopponents. Japan was still poised on theborder of India, where a massive uprisinginstigated by Gandhi against British rulehad just been suppressed. Meanwhile,both America and Britain were bracingfor their impending landings in Italy.How likely was it that Churchillwould respond to news of the Bengalfamine—the seriousness of which wasyet unrealized by his India advisersViceroy Linlithgow and Secretary forIndia Leo Amery—as anything morethan an unwelcome distraction?Past doubt, Churchill’s feelingstoward India at that time were far fromcharitable. He and British officials hadnarrowly averted disaster by suppressingthe Quit India movement, which hadthreatened to shut down the country

even as the Japanese threatened it withinvasion. And, like most Englishmen ofhis generation, Churchill held views onIndians and other non-whites that arevery far from our thinking today.Yet Mukerjee’s evidence ofChurchill’s intransigence on India stemsmainly from Leo Amery’s diary, wherehe recorded every one of the PrimeMinister’s furious outbursts wheneverAmery brought up the famine in theWar Cabinet—whether Churchill meantwhat he said or not.Amery privately decided that onIndia, “Winston is not quite sane,” andrecorded in August 1944 Churchill’sremark that relief would do no goodbecause Indians “breed like rabbits” andwould outstrip any available foodsupply. “Naturally I lost patience,”Amery records, “and couldn’t helptelling him that I didn’t see much differencebetween his outlook andHitler’s, which annoyed him no little.”This invidious comparison ofChurchill with Hitler is the thematichinge of the book. Unfortunately for theauthor, the actual record contradicts heraccount at almost every point.When the War Cabinet becamefully aware of the extent of the famine,on 24 September 1943, it agreed tosend 200,000 tons of grain to India bythe end of the year. Far from seeking tostarve India, Churchill and his cabinetsought every way to alleviate the sufferingwithout undermining the wareffort. The war—not starving Indians—remained the principal concern.Reading Mukerjee’s account, onemight never know there was a world warraging. Germany barely rates a mention.Japan appears mainly as the sympathetically of Indian nationalists like SubhasChandra Bose. In reality, Japan andGermany had far more dire plans forIndia than any hatched in Britain.Even Amery noted, during theQuebec Conference, that the case againstdiverting vital war shipping to India was“unassailable.” Far from a racist conspiracyto break the country, the viceroynoted, “all the Dominion Governmentsare doing their best to help.” WhileChurchill and the War Cabinet vetoed aCanadian proposal to send 100,000 tonsof wheat to India, they did push forAustralia to fulfill that commitment.The greatest irony of all is that itwas Churchill who appointed, inOctober 1943, the viceroy who wouldhalt the famine in its tracks: GeneralArchibald Wavell immediately commandeeredthe army to move rice and grainfrom areas where it was plentiful towhere it was not, and begged Churchillto send what help he could. On 14February 1944 Churchill called anemergency meeting of the War Cabinetto see if they would send more aidwithout wrecking plans for the comingNormandy invasion. “I will certainlyhelp you all I can,” Churchilltelegraphed Wavell on the 14th, “butyou must not ask the impossible.”The next day Churchill wiredWavell: “We have given a great deal ofthought to your difficulties, but wesimply cannot find the shipping.”Amery told the viceroy that Churchill“was not unsympathetic” to the terriblesituation, but that no one had ships tospare with military operations in theoffing. On April 28th Churchill spearheadedan appeal to Roosevelt and theAmericans, but they too proved resistantto humanitarian appeals with the invasionof Europe pending.Another irony: the 1943 harvestwas one of the largest in India’s history.Claims of starvation and civil unrestseemed far-fetched in London, as theydid in Washington. And Wavell thankedChurchill for “your generous assistance”in getting Australia to send 350,000tons of wheat to India—although stillshort of the 600,000 thought necessary.These ironies are lost on Ms.Mukerjee. If Churchill had trulyintended to maintain the Raj in Indiaby undermining nationalists like Gandhiand Bose, he could have done no betterthan to divert vital resources. ButChurchill’s attention was focused onwinning the war. Amery admitted asmuch in a note to Wavell after D-Day:“Winston, in his position, will naturallyrun any risk rather than one whichimmediately affects the great militarystakes to which we are committed.”Churchill could be ruthless in pursuinghis main objective, as citizens ofDresden, Hamburg, Berlin and otherGerman cities learned. But no imperialistor racist motives can be imputed here.Of all those who ignored theBengal famine, the most curious case isMs. Mukerjee’s hero, MohandasGandhi. For all his reputation as ahumanitarian, Gandhi did remarkablylittle about the emergency. The issuebarely comes up in his letters, except asanother grievance against the Raj—which, in peacetime, had alwayshandled famines with efficiency.In February 1944 Gandhi wroteWavell: “I know that millions outside arestarving for want of food. But I shouldfeel utterly helpless if I went out andmissed the food [i.e. independence] bywhich alone living becomes worthwhile.”Gandhi felt free to conduct hisprivate “fast unto death” in order toforce the British out, even as the rest ofIndia starved, because he felt he wasplaying for far bigger stakes. As wasWinston Churchill. ,“A1” Returns in LeatherRICHARD M. LANGWORTHWinston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand FieldForce (Cohen A1). Easton Press Military History Library,232 pp. Available from the publisher (tel. 800-243-5160or via www. eastonpressbooks.com), $79 postpaid.The Easton Press is known for its leatherbound editionsof classic books—albeit not the greatest leather. Theyfavor a stiff, highly varnished grade of pigskin, although theynicely trim their books with moire endpapers, silk pagemarkers and gilt page edges. >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 51

R E V I E W S“A1” RETURNS...Easton rendered a great service byreprinting three important multivolumeChurchill works. After FinestHour expressed disappointment withtheir 1989 version of The Second WorldWar (which did not use the definitivetext), they consulted us over The WorldCrisis and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1991-92) offprintingfrom first editions and including fullcolorreprints of fold-out maps. Then in2000, they reissued the DefinitiveEdition of Churchill’s 1952 collectedWar Speeches—which, like their WorldCrisis, cost far less than first editions,making the books particularly attractiveto scholars and libraries.We were not involved in Easton’sreprint of Churchill’s first book (CohenA1), but unlike their recent reprint ofMy African Journey (see page 55), it isnot an offprint of the Collected Worksedition, edited by the late Fred Woods.It does include Woods’s redrawn maps,and all of his footnotes—more than inChurchill’s original, although all ofWSC’s are included. But it lacks subjectsynopses following chapter heads, whichappear in every previous Malakand.For the 1974 Collected Works,Woods redrew many maps, eliminatingsome of the original fold-outs andchanging certain map locations. Textediting varied, but he was particularlyzealous with The River War. Names ofplaces were modernized, and there wereother textual revisions. One review commendedWoods, saying that Churchill“took little care” over his maps. Scholarsand bibliophiles thought otherwise.Tracking text sources for eachvolume of Collected Works for myConnoissseur’s Guide in 1998, I foundthat the Malakand was based on the1899 Silver Library text—a good choice.This was the first edition in whichChurchill had the opportunity tocorrect the errors of his uncle MoretonFrewen (aka “Mortal Ruin”), who editedthe 1898 original. Nevertheless, Woodsdid alter such words as “Karachi,” whichChurchill spelled “Kurrâchee.”On this volume it seems clear thatEaston reset Woods’s text, omitted thechapter synopses and renumberedWoods’s footnotes sequentially. Woods(and Easton) also omitted Churchill’simportant second edition preface. Butthere is no way to tell, short of a pageby-pagecomparison, how true to theSilver Library edition the text remains.More could have been done. Therecent and forthcoming ISI editions ofThoughts and Adventures and GreatContemporaries, edited by James Mullerand Paul Courtenay (FH 143: 44-45)are models of what a modern editionshould be. While Churchill’s text is leftin its original form, erudite new introductionsand profuse footnotes provideany needed corrections and tell us whathappened to people, places and thingsover the years since the first edition.The Malakand has had a new lifeof late with its relevant reflections onLEADING CHURCHILL MYTHS #20:Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolini allaluce del processo Guareschi (TheChurchill-Mussolini File in light ofthe Guareschi trial), by UbaldoGiuliani-Balestrino. Edizioni SettimoSigillo, Rome, 224 pp., €20 fromUnilibro, http://xrl.us/bh5vs6.For years conspiracy theorists have citedletters between Churchill and BenitoMussolini, in which Churchill makesvarious proposals for peace, and evenwarfare in that part of the world. (See“Coalition with Primitives 2010,” FH147: 22-23). But Easton provides nospecial introduction, although a loosesheet describes the book with no referenceto modern parallels.Presuming Easton’s text is essentiallyWoods’s, this is nothing more thana nicely bound version of the CollectedWorks edition. And, since this same textwas offprinted by Leo Cooper, W. W.Norton, Barnes & Noble and others,you don’t have to spend $79 to ownone. Just dial up www.bookfinder.comto browse among offerings priced as lowas $8.41. Still, if you wish to own thedefinitive text, consider acquiring areading copy of the 1901 Silver Libraryor 1916 Shilling Library editions. ,“Churchill Offered Peace and Security to Mussolini”PATRIZIO ROMANO GIANGRECOoffers to safeguard the “Duce of Fascism”from reprisals in the last days of WorldWar II. They date from just before Italyjoined the war to just before Mussolini,who had become head of Hitler’s puppetItalian Social Republic, and his mistressClara Petacci, were captured and executedby partisans in April 1945.A Petacci nephew in Arizona hasadded to the stew by publishing what hesays are her diaries. His introductionoffers yet another twist: Petacci, itclaims, was actually a British spy whosemission was to steal the Churchill lettersto protect the Prime Minister.Il carteggio Churchill-Mussolinidoesn’t even bother to illustrate thesubject letters, and is so poorly writtenand documented that it is scarcely credible.But it does present an opportunityto recap the whole sordid story.The title refers to the first appearanceof the “letters” in 1954, wheneditor Giovanni Guareschi publishedthem in his magazine Candido. Mr.Guareschi also published alleged 1944letters by Alcide De Gasperi (postwar________________________________________________________________________Mr. Giangreco is a Naples engineer whose assistance to FH dates back to issue #100, when heobtained in translation Luigi Barzini’s marvelous article on Churchill in the 1910 Dundee election.The author thanks Professor Andrew Martin Garvey of the Italian Army Officers’ College and theUniversity of Turin, for his helpful suggestions and advice in preparing this review.FINEST HOUR 149 / 52

head of the Italian government), askingthe Allies to bomb Rome in order toaccelerate German withdrawal fromItaly. After a great outcry, they weredeclared forgeries by an Italian court,which sentenced Guareschi to prison fordefamation of a head of government.The Churchill-Mussolini “letters”played only a minor part in theGuareschi trial, but that hasn’t stoppedthem from being “revealed” by severalbooks since. Giuliani-Balestrino maintainsthat they are as genuine as thesupposed De Gasperi letters. He is notalone. Renzo De Felice, official historianof Fascism and biographer of Mussolini,also claimed that he had firm proof ofvalidity; unfortunately De Felice died in1996, his evidence unpublished.According to Il carteggioChurchill-Mussolini, Il Duce was capturedwith a cache of documentsincluding Churchill’s “letters.” The plotthickens with a certain “Captain John”(no surname given) whom Churchillallegedly sent to recover the file, whosupposedly ordered Mussolini’s execution.Italian historians have labelled thisversion of Mussolini’s execution la pistainglese (the English trail).In September 1945, Giuliani-Balestrino tells us, Churchill himself gotinvolved: He traveled to Villa Aprexinon Lake Como, in an area once controlledby Mussolini’s rump republic. Aphotograph of Churchill during his staywas published, we are told, on page 210of R.G. Grant’s Churchill: AnIllustrated Biography.Churchill’s visit was ostensibly apainting holiday, but its real purpose,Giuliani-Balestrino states, was to retrievethe incriminating Mussolini file containinghis embarrassing overtures to theDuce. (With so many people determinedto steal the file, it’s a wonder thatnone of them succeeded.)The only problem with all this isthat Churchill’s villa, where he stayed asa guest of Field Marshal Alexander from2 to 19 September, was La Rosa, andthe photograph of him painting nearbyis the one in Grant’s book.WSC left La Rosa on the 19th forthe Villa Pirelli near Genoa, where hewas met by Col. Wathen, commander ofthe Genoa Sub-Area (Giuliani-Balestrino says WSC was travelingincognito under the name of Col.“Waltham.”). A few days later, Churchillwent to Monte Carlo, and then to avilla at Antibes on the French Riviera,lent to him by Eisenhower. MartinGilbert’s Volume VIII describes WSC’stravels in detail on pages 134-51.Giuliani-Balestrino doesn’t botherto show us the alleged letters, so let usturn to the most persuasive of the conspiracytheorists, Arrigo Petacco, whoillustrates them in his Dear Benito—Caro Winston (Milan 1985): salutationsnot found in the “letters” themselves.Ignore the stilted English, andthat nobody knows the provenance, andthat no technical analysis of paper orsignatures was conducted. Just readingthem destroys their credibility.22 April 1940: This letter is fromChartwell, which was shut during thewar—not that a home address would beused in a State communication. Also,Churchill, First Lord of the Admiraltyon 22 April, was unlikely to beresponding to propositions from aforeign head of government. The “proposals”it says the Privy Council (notWar Cabinet?) “broadly accepted” areunstated. The signature looks blotchyand uneven, as if reproduced and pastedin place; two words are misspelled; twoparagraphs begin with lower-case letters;and the type is not the large font usedin Churchill’s official letters.15 May 1940: Some of the words(but not WSC’s words of determination)are actually those Churchill didwrite (on May 16th according to hismemoirs). But Prime Ministers wrote onDowning Street not OHMS stationery,and would not likely have used thegrandiose title “Duce of Fascism.”31 March 1945: The third letterfinally gets the notepaper right, but onecan hardly imagine Churchill writing insuch sugary and soothing tones to a manhe had repeatedly vilified since 1940—even assuming Mussolini was in aposition to make “suggestions.” Again,the signature is suspect, another word ismisspelled, and the large type font isabsent. And why, on a letterhead reading“Whitehall,” would the sender add theword “London”?continued on page 57...FRAUDS: 22 April 1940, above, with two mispellings.15 May 1940, below, uses some but not all of WSC’sactual words and a title, “Duce of Fascism,” Churchillwould have choked on. OHMS letterhead is also odd.31 March 1945, datelined “London” but on stationeryreading “Whitehall,” with another spelling error.FINEST HOUR 149 / 53

C O H E N C O R N E R“Uganda Is Defended by Its Insects”:Churchill’s African TravelogueR O N A L D I. C O H E N___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Mr. Cohen (ron@chartwellcomm.com) is author of the Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, 3 vols. (Continuum, 2006)and a longtime Finest Hour contributor. Photographs from the author’s collection. Numbers are from the Cohen Bibliography.Above: Hodder & Stoughton the first English edition (Cohen A27.1, left) but only 903 of thepaper wraps Colonial edition (A27.3, right): the rarest form of MAJ and one of the scarcest inthe entire Churchill canon. The cover was a woodcut of WSC with his white rhinocerous.Left: The striking Hodder& Stoughton SixpennyNovels edition (A27.8),March 1910, reset in twocolumns, with its artisticfront cover: 20,009 copieswere printed for domesticand export use.Right: Preceding allvolume editions wereserialisations in theBritish (C228a) andAmerican (C228b) StrandMagazine, beginning inthe March and April 1908issues respectively.FINEST HOUR 149 / 54

In December 1905, Prime Minister SirHenry Campbell-Bannermanappointed Winston Churchill Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. Ayear and a half later, on 5 June 1907,Churchill proposed visiting British EastAfrica. His superior, Colonial SecretaryLord Elgin, wrote: “…if it is convenient& appeals to you to undertake that expedition,it will I am sure be of the greatestadvantage that you should have seen thecountry—where we have so many difficultproblems to deal with.” Elgin addedthat he hoped “it will be a pleasant aswell as an interesting trip.”Plans advanced and LadyRandolph wrote Winston on August22nd that she “hate[d] to think of yourgoing off for so long—and that I shallnot see you again before your departure.”Winston’s soon-to-be sister-in-law, LadyGwendeline Bertie (“Goonie”), wrotehim several letters before his departure,including one in which she expressed thehope he would not be visiting Uganda:“It is a country of fevers, man killingcountry, full of pestilentious insects andpoisonous marshes....” He did plan to gothere and, in a very unusual inscriptionin a copy of My African Journey, he laterwrote: “Uganda is defended by its insects.p. 94”—and on page 94 of the firstedition we read these same words, followedby a typically Churchillian passage:The dreaded Spirillum tick has begun toinfest the roads like a tiny footpad, andscarcely any precautions avail with certaintyagainst him….When he bites aninfected person he does not contract theSpirillum fever himself, nor does hetransmit it directly to other persons. By apeculiarly malevolent provision of naturethis power is exercised not by him butby his descendants, who are numberedin hundreds. So the poison spreads in anincalculable progression. Although thisfever is not fatal, it is exceptionallypainful in its course and distressing in itsconsequences.Subsequent editions of MyAfrican Journey. Above, L-R:Neville-Spearman (Cohen A27.9),Icon (A27.10) and Heron Books(A27.11) appeared 1962-65.Left: The New English Library,1972 (A27.12). Right: The mostrecent Easton Press volume,1995 (A27.16). Below L-R: Issuedin 1989 by Leo Cooper (A27.13),Norton (A27.14) and Mandarinpaperback (A27.15).Churchill set out on September10th, passing through France, Italy,Austria, Malta, Cyprus and Aden beforearriving in Mombasa in early November.Already a much-in-demand author, hehad begun his negotiations (with TheStrand Magazine) for the publication ofa series of articles and photographs onhis East African trip before departing,although it was only after he arrivedthere that those negotiations were concluded.As originally contemplated,Churchill was to be paid £150 per articlefor a five-part serialisation in The Strandplus £30 for the photographs.On November 17th Churchillwrote his brother Jack: “I have received afine offer from the Strand Magazine forfive articles for £750, which I propose toaccept, as it will definitely liquidate allpossible expenses in this journey. Therewill be another £500 in book form.”The excitement of Churchill’stravels can only be appreciated from thetext of the work, which he described as“a continuous narrative of the lighterside of what was to me a very delightfuland inspiring journey.” By the 27th ofDecember, however, our author was backon the Nile, and 3 January 1908 foundhim relaxing in Cairo. Only ten dayslater Churchill stopped at the elegantHotel Bristol in Paris, and was diningwith his brother at the Ritz Hotel inLondon on the 17th. >>FINEST HOUR 149 / 55

AFRICAN TRAVELOGUE...Churchill earned considerably more fromhis articles than had been anticipated.His agent of the day, Alexander PollockWatt, succeeded in convincing GreenhoughSmith, editor of The Strand Magazine,to pay an additional £150 each fortwo more articles. Ultimately, nine werepublished, and Churchill was paid a totalof £1050 for what had been contractedas “35,000 words of matter divided intoeight articles.” The first part was publishedin the March 1908 issue of theBritish Strand, priced at 6d., and in theApril 1908 issue of the American Strand,priced at 15¢.The book rights to My AfricanJourney were not shopped around to thepublishing trade in the way LordRandolph Churchill had been. In fact,the publisher of The Strand Magazinehad a loose first-refusal arrangementwith Hodder & Stoughton, whichagreed to an important Churchilliancondition, namely, that “the whole ofthe amount of the advance is paid to youon the delivery of the ‘copy,’ as you wishit.” The publisher did, however, requirethat Churchill provide an additional10,000 words to differentiate the bookfrom the magazine serialisation. In theend, the volume was published inDecember 1908, a month later thanHodder & Stoughton had hoped, buttimed with the appearance of the lastmonthly installment in the BritishStrand. While the Hodder & Stoughtonarchives have not yielded a copy of thepublishing contract, it is clear thatChurchill secured an advance of close to£1000 for the volume rights.Hodder & Stoughton printed12,500 copies, of which 8161 were soldor distributed gratis. The front cover wasan artist’s rendition of WSC standingover the white rhino he had bagged. Theprint run included 1976 Colonial clothcopies, which are distinguished only bythe presence of an “asterisk” below thepublisher’s name on the spine. Amongthese was the Canadian issue by WilliamBriggs, which I estimate speculatively asbeing about 250 copies. It is worthnoting that technically, Briggs was notthe Canadian publisher: that was theMethodist Book and Publishing House,of which Briggs was the Steward. But itChurchill’s wry tribute to Uganda’s wildlife on an inscribed copy.AMERICAN ISSUE: bound in plain reddish-brown cloth, above left. The first subissue(A27.4, above right) used the British title page, right; the second (A27.5, belowleft) had a modified title page cancellans showing “New York and London” as placesof issue; the third (A27.6, below right) showed George Doran as the publisher.was undeniably Briggs’s name thatappeared on the title page and spine.There were also 903 copies of thefragile card wrappers Colonial issue. Thisis without doubt the rarest edition/issueof My African Journey and one of thevery rarest of all volumes in theChurchill canon, much scarcer in myexperience than The People’s Rights(Cohen A31), For Free Trade (CohenA18) or even the second edition of Mr.Brodrick’s Army (Cohen A10.2). Aswould be expected, it is distinguished bythe presence of the asterisk below thepublisher’s imprint on the spine.Of the first run of Hodder &Stoughton sheets, 1400 copies wereshipped to the United States, where thepublisher was the Canadian-trainedGeorge H. Doran, whose offices were ina publisher-dominated building on West32nd Street in New York City (whereAppleton, Henry Holt and the OxfordUniversity Press were also located). TheAmerican publication date was 27February 1909.There were three separate subissuesof the American issue,distinguished only by the title pages.The binding was, in each case, a uniformlyuninteresting dark reddish-brownembossed calico-texture cloth. I have discoveredno information that wouldenable me to allocate quantities amongthese three issues.Collectors always set great store bydust jackets, and the assumption in theabsence of evidence is that most bookshad them, even in those years. But Ihave never seen or heard mention of ajacket for My African Journey. It may bethat the illustrated top board was in lieuFINEST HOUR 149 / 56

of a jacket, at least on the English firstedition.In my view the most attractiveedition of My African Journey wasHodder & Stoughton’s March 1910publication of the work in its SixpennyNovels list. Reset in two columns, thefront cover of this extremely fragileedition is striking. Of the 20,009 copiesprinted, 16,365 had been sold domesticallyand 3644 shipped for export by theend of the company’s 1916-17 fiscalyear. I am unaware of any feature distinguishingexport from domestic copies.While the newsprint-quality paper andthin wrappers (0.18 mm, half the thicknessof the 0.36 mm Colonial cardwrappers) rendered these copies muchmore perishable than the card-wrappersColonials, more than twenty times asmany were printed and—as would beexpected—many more of the 1910“paperback” survived. They remainuncommon and quite scarce in nearperfectcondition.It was more than half a centurybefore My African Journey was againpublicly available. In November 1962,Neville Spearman and the Holland Pressrepublished it in London, and then onChurchill’s 80th birthday, Icon Bookspublished the first modern paperbackedition of the work. Heron Books thenrepublished the volume in Geneva, possiblyin 1965. Additional appearancesSPINE IMPRINTS: The First English edition (and all three American sub-issues)carried Hodder & Stoughton imprints, above left; copies for the export marketwere designated by an asterisk (A27.2 cased, above right, A27.3 card wrapperversion, below left); the Briggs Canadian issue (A27.7) carried its own imprint.over the next twenty-five years were theNew English Library (London, 1972);Leo Cooper (London, 1989); Norton(New York, 1990); Mandarin Books(paperback, London, 1990); and, last ofall, Easton Press (leatherbound,Norwalk, Connecticut, 1992).My African Journey is uniqueamong Churchill works: his only travelbook, probably the most colorfullybound among first editions, and a textthat offers a glimpse of East Africa asyoung Winston saw it. ,Print RunsA27.1-7 First edition, only printing(1908). Total print run, 12,500, distributedas follows:UK cased (cloth-bound): 8,161Colonial cased: 1,726Canadian cased: 250 (estimate)Colonial card-wrapped: 903USA cased (3 states): 1,400Unaccounted for: 60A27.8 Second (paper wrappers) edition,only printing (1910). Total run: 20,009.MYTHS, from page 53...Petacco’s only published Mussoliniletter, 18 May 1940, is a handwrittendraft of the words in his official letter toChurchill, who dated it the 16th, possiblyin error, in Their Finest Hour.Serious Italian historians andcourts concluded long ago that theChurchill “letters” to Mussolini aretransparent frauds. Churchill admittedin Their Finest Hour that he had onceexpressed admiration for the Duce,whom he first considered a bulwarkagainst Bolshevism. Obviously, however,the admiration came to an end whenMussolini allied Italy with NaziGermany. The Prime Minister whowould have “no truce or parley” withHitler and his “grizzly gang” wouldnever have parleyed with the man hereferred to as Hitler’s “Italian jackal.” ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 57WSC paintsnear VillaRosa, LakeComo: theactual photoin Grant’sIllustratedBiography.WHAT CHURCHILL REALLY WROTE:Prime Minister to Signor Mussolini 16.V.40Now that I have taken up my office asPrime Minister and Minister of Defence Ilook back to our meetings in Rome and feela desire to speak words of goodwill to you asChief of the Italian nation across what seemsto be a swiftly-widening gulf. Is it too late tostop a river of blood from flowing betweenthe British and Italian peoples? We can nodoubt inflict grievous injuries upon oneanother and maul each other cruelly, anddarken the Mediterranean with our strife. Ifyou so decree, it must be so; but I declarethat I have never been the enemy of Italiangreatness, nor ever at heart the foe of theItalian lawgiver. It is idle to predict thecourse of the great battles now raging inEurope, but I am sure that whatever mayhappen on the Continent England will go onto the end, even quite alone, as we have donebefore, and I believe with some assurancethat we shall be aided in increasing measureby the United States, and, indeed, by all theAmericas.“I beg you to believe that it is in nospirit of weakness or of fear that I make thissolemn appeal, which will remain on record.Down the ages above all other calls comesthe cry that the joint heirs of Latin andChristian civilisation must not be rangedagainst one another in mortal strife. Hearkento it, I beseech you in all honour and respect,before the dread signal is given. It will neverbe given by us.” , >>

R E V I E W SThe Least of the Lot—by a Long WayDAVID FREEMANHis Finest Hour: A Biography ofWinston Churchill, by ChristopherCatherwood. New York: Skyhorse;London: Robinson, hardbound, 272pp., $22.95, Member price $18.35.The turn of the century brought in aflood of mostly respectable, briefbiographical studies of Churchill whichcrested in 2005 with Paul Addison’sChurchill: The Unexpected Hero, abook rightly described in these pages bythe late John Ramsden as the best of thelot “and by a long way.” That judgmentremains secure as the ebb tide nowbrings in the detritus that is His FinestHour: a book that must be regarded asthe least of the lot—by a long way.Already the author of two meretriciousmonographs about aspects ofChurchill’s career, Catherwood does nottake animadversions well, opining in thefinal chapter of his latest book that “abiographer who tries to steer a middle,balanced course gets attacked from bothsides” (228). Before remonstrating, heshould have taken the time to check hisfacts. It takes neither a Churchill admirernor a critic to find that his book recyclesfar too many myths and misconceptionslong ago set straight by more levelheadedhistorians.For openers, the chapter dealingwith Churchill’s youth features generous_____________________________________Prof. Freeman teaches history at CaliforniaState University Fullerton.use of words like “possibly” and“perhaps,” while resting heavily on thedubious, shop-worn suppositions ofAnthony Storr and Lord Moran thatChurchill was an alcohol-dependentmanic depressive.Lady Soames once addressedStorr’s pretentious pronouncement ofher father’s malady as a remarkable diagnosisfrom someone who never knewhim. Lord Moran knew him—very wellindeed—but usually when he was ill.Moran’s “diaries” (Churchill: TheStruggle for Survival, 1965) departedsignificantly from the material he actuallywrote in his diary at the time.Relying on such sources contributes toCatherwood’s catalog of conjecture,which itself merely precedes a series ofgross factual errors.Catherwood’s understanding ofissues like Imperial Preference and theTen-Year Rule is seriously flawed, whilehis accounts of episodes such as SidneyStreet, Tonypandy and Irish independ-Smolensk: A World War II ClimactericPUBLISHER’S NOTEBarbarossa Derailed: The Battle forSmolensk 10 July-10 September 1941,Vol. 1, by David M. Glantz. HelionPublishers, 656 pp., illus., $59.95,Member price $47.95.At dawn on 10 July 1941, massedtanks and motorized infantry ofGerman Army Group Center’s Secondand Third Panzer Groups crossed theence are just dead wrong. Incidentally,Martin Gilbert’s “The Golden Eggs”(pages 20-27) does a nice job of sinkingCatherwood's fatuous theories aboutWSC's decisionmaking in World War II.The full list of errors runs too long to becited here, and would bore our readers,who have been over the same groundrepeatedly in the past.There can be no excuse for thiskind of professional ineptitude in an agewhen facts can be easily verified byInternet research as well as traditionalprint sources. For example, a brief visitto the “Leading Churchill Myths” onwww.winstonchurchill.org, or a readingof Martin Gilbert’s 1991 biography,Churchill: A Life, could have forestalledmost of the errors Catherwood commits.Faced with such sloppy scholarship, thepotential reader is well advised to turninstead to the vastly superior studies ledby Paul Addison, Geoffrey Best, JohnKeegan and Ian Wood. This is oneFinest Hour that isn’t. ,Dnieper and Western Daugava Rivers.Since June 22nd, when Hitler unleashedOperation Barbarossa, his invasion of theSoviet Union, the Wehrmacht hadadvanced up to 500 kilometers intoRussia, killed or captured up to onemillion Red Army soldiers, and reachedthe two rivers. This satisfied Hitler’sassumption that Germany would emergevictorious if it could defeat and destroythe bulk of the Red Army before it withdrewto safety behind the Daugava andDnieper. With the Red Army shattered,Hitler and most Germans expected totalvictory in a matter of weeks.The ensuing battles in theSmolensk region frustrated Germanhopes for quick victory. Despitedestroying two Soviet armies and encirclingthe remnants near Smolensk, theywere soon faced by seven newly-mobilizedSoviet armies. Smolensk ultimatelybecame the crucial turning point inOperation Barbarossa.This is the most thorough descriptionof Smolensk ever assembled; asecond volume is coming in 2011. ,FINEST HOUR 149 / 58

C H U R C H I L L P R O C E E D I N G SFuture Shock? The Contingencyof What Lies AheadChurchill’s “Fifty Years Hence” (1931)We must now choose—or somehow avoid—wars and weaponsthat may destroy the human race. Or we may take a road to thenightmare vision of a world without moral guidelines, withgenetically engineered robots whose thoughts as well asphysiology and actions are controlled by the State.P A U L A L K O NWhile writing my book, WinstonChurchill’s Imagination,what surprised me most washis affinity with science fiction. Hementions works by Jules Verne, GeorgeChesney, Karel Čapek and Olaf Stapledon.He enthusiastically praised the sciencefiction (though not the politics) ofH.G. Wells. Churchill’s 1930 essay, “IfLee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg,”1 is an outstanding early exampleof alternative history, now a very popularform recognized as a major branch ofscience fiction.Alternative history revises thepast. In the world postulated byChurchill’s essay, Lee does win at Gettysburgand the Confederacy achievesindependence, frees its slaves, and coexistsalongside the United States.Churchill’s narrator speculateson what might have happened if theConfederates had lost. He suggests thatinstead of the enduring European peaceachieved (however implausibly from our viewpoint) as aconsequence of Union defeat in the Civil War, theremight have been a world war early in the 20th century.CHURCHILL IN 1931Triumphant Confederacies becamea minor staple of science fiction,although most such works show no goodcoming from a Southern victory, e.g.,Ward Moore’s 1955 classic, Bring the Jubilee.It is a virtue of Churchill’s storythat, going against this strain, “If LeeHad Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”invites readers to make a more difficultleap from their preconceptions.It is shocking enough to provokereconsideration of the moral issuesat stake in the American Civil War. Moreimportantly, however, Churchill dramatizesand invites acceptance of the ideathat there was nothing inevitable aboutthat war’s outcome, or perhaps aboutmost of what we now take for granted assettled history.One of Churchill’s great themes,as conspicuous in “Shall We All CommitSuicide?” as in “Fifty Years Hence,” is thecontingency of human events. Alternativehistory is called “counterfactual history”by historians. Some regard it as a thought experiment, indispensablein exploring chains of causation, but otherswarn against it as fallacious reasoning. >>__________________________________________________________________________________________Dr. Alkon, a Churchill Centre Academic Adviser, is Leo S. Bing Professor Emeritus of English and American Literature at theUniversity of Southern California. He has published books on Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe, science fiction, and WinstonChurchill’s Imagination (2006). He won our 2003 Somervell Prize for his Lawrence of Arabia features in Finest Hour 119.FINEST HOUR 149 / 59

FIFTY YEARS HENCE...As a writer, Churchill often includes within historicalnarratives brief counterfactual passages—miniaturealternative histories. They are a major feature of hismethod as an historian. As a reader, Churchill liked storiesthat portray possible futures rather than imaginarypasts. He judged science fiction by its accuracy as prediction.Accordingly, he preferred Wells to Verne on thegrounds that Wells is in tune with 20th century trends,even though he (like Churchill ) got started as a writerlate in the Victorian fin de siècle milieu: “Jules Verne delightedthe Victorians. He toldthem about all the things theyhoped they would be able todo. He showed them the possibilitiesof science applied to the19th century. Wells took up hiswork in the 20th, carried itmuch further in a far morecomplex scene—and Wells sawthe bloody accomplished fact,illustrating his pages while theirink was wet.” 2Thus, for Churchill,the convergence of reality withfiction, of the actual future witha fictional forecast, was a hallmarkof the best science fiction.But “Shall We AllCommit Suicide?” and “FiftyYears Hence” are not sciencefiction. They are essays in prediction—attemptsat what wemight now call futurology,without stories or imaginarycharacters as vehicles for theirviews of possible futures. Whatthese two essays most significantly share with science fictionis that both stress the contingency of what liesahead. They show that different possibilities exist, manyalready available to present-day imagination. They implythat there is no single inevitable future.We must now choose—or somehow avoid—wars and weapons that may destroy the human race inways outlined in “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” Wemay embark on a road to the utopian future sketched in“Fifty Years Hence.” Or we may take a road to the nightmarevision of a world without moral guidelines, with geneticallyengineered robots whose thoughts as well asphysiology and actions are controlled by the State. Thatwould be another way of rendering humans extinct evenworse than being blown to oblivion by atom bombs.In a very science fictional image, Churchill suggeststhat such dehumanization is a fate “from which a fortunatecollision with some wandering star, reducing the earth to incandescentgas, might be a merciful deliverance.” 3Yet Churchill also makes clear that merely preservingthe human race as we now know it is perhapsequally unsatisfactory: “Under sufficient stress—starvation,terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectualfrenzy, the modern man we know so well will do themost terrible deeds, and his modern woman will backhim up” (294). Events since this was written in 1931have done nothing to diminishits accuracy or relevance.Churchill’s dystopia ofdehumanizing thought-controlin “Fifty Years Hence”partly anticipates George Orwell’s1984. This novel dramatizes,among other things,the replacement of humans bymindless creatures of theState. Orwell’s working titlewas The Last Man in Europe. 4Orwell named his protagonistWinston Smith, intribute to Churchill. As Smithis being brainwashed in1984’s terrifying prisonscenes, his interrogatorO’Brien asks, “Do you consideryourself a man?” WhenSmith says “Yes,” O’Brienreplies, “If you are a man,Winston, you are the lastman. Your kind is extinct; weare the inheritors.” 5Churchill’s vision ofgenetic engineering even more closely anticipates AldousHuxley’s Brave New World, published in early 1932,shortly after “Fifty Years Hence” appeared in the December1931 Strand Magazine. Inspired mainly by KarelČapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots, Churchill arrivedindependently as well as slightly ahead of Huxley atthe same core idea of people biologically and psychologicallyconditioned by their government in ways that eliminatehuman freedom and even what is commonly takento be human nature.Churchill treats the idea concisely and somberly.Huxley’s longer work is a comic tour de force that pointsan equally somber moral. Brave New World has achievedenduring fame, thanks to its hilariously effective satire aswell as the ever-increasing relevance its warning sharesFINEST HOUR 149 / 60

“What is most original and, I believe,most relevant now in ‘Fifty YearsHence’ is Churchill’s insistence thatwe can no longer take the past as aguide to the future. The acceleratedpace of change induced by the rapidprogress of science, he explains, hascreated an unprecedenteddiscontinuity in human history.”with that in Churchill’s “Fifty Years Hence.” In sciencefiction, Churchill is very far from the equal of Orwelland Huxley. Nevertheless Churchill was alert to the social,intellectual, and artistic currents that promptedtheir masterpieces, and well able to try his hand to goodeffect at related forms of writing.What is most original and, I believe, most relevantnow in “Fifty Years Hence” is Churchill’s insistencethat we can no longer take the past as a guide to the future.The accelerated pace of change induced by the rapidprogress of science, he explains, has created an unprecedenteddiscontinuity in human history. Therefore, attemptsat prediction as a basis for current decisions mustadopt the scientific method of extrapolation, and discardthe historian’s quest for past patterns and cycles of eventsthat may be expected to recur with only slight variations:There are two processes which we adopt, consciouslyor unconsciously when we try to prophesy.We can seek a period in the past whose conditionsresemble as closely as possible those of our day, andpresume that the sequel to that period will, save forminor alterations, be repeated. Secondly, we cansurvey the general course of development in ourimmediate past, and endeavour to prolong it intothe near future. The first is the method of the historian;the second that of the scientist. Only thesecond is open to us now, and this only in a partialsphere. (288)This perceptive insight amounts to a paradoxthat Churchill wisely made no attempt to resolve. He,after all, was a historian—and a prolific one at that—who believed deeply in the importance of knowing history.He preached what he practiced. “Study history,study history” turns up prominently, and rightly so, onChurchill Centre literature.Nor was Churchill averse, even in the decade ofwriting “Fifty Years Hence,” to drawing parallels betweenthe past and the present. In his biography of MarlboroughChurchill scatters implied and explicit comparisonsbetween the dangers of Louis XIV’s aggressive regimeand the totalitarian threats looming in the 1930s. But inMarlborough, although not putting the matter in thetheoretical terms of his comparison between the methodsof historians and scientists, Churchill remarks the paradoxthat history must be studied, even though “the successof a commander does not arise from following rulesor models. It consists in an absolutely new comprehensionof the dominant facts of the situation at the time,and all the forces at work…every great operation of waris unique.” 6And by implication, surely not just operations ofwar. There can be no mistaking the import or relevanceof Churchill’s view of history: know the past but never,never count on it as an exact guide to the present or, especially,the future. Expect the unexpected.No lesson could be harder. ,Endnotes1. “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”appeared in Finest Hour 103 and is available from the editorby email. First published in Scribner’s Magazine, December1930; reprinted in volume form in If It Had Happened Otherwise,ed. J.C. Squire (London: Longmans Green, 1931), 73;The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols., ed.Michael Wolff (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975),IV: 73; and, heavily abridged, in The Great Republic, ed. WinstonS. Churchill (New York, Random House, 1999), 246.2. Winston S. Churchill, “H.G. Wells,” in The CollectedEssays of Sir Winston Churchill, III: 53.3. Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures,ed. James W. Muller with Paul H. Courtenay and Alana L.Barton (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2009), 293.Subsequent page references for quotations from this edition ofThoughts and Adventures are given parenthetically in the text.4. Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life (1980; revisededition, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books,1982), 582. For an excellent account of the biographical andhistorical contexts of 1984, see Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: WintryConscience of a Generation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).See also Robert Pilpel, “Churchill and Orwell,” Finest Hour142, Spring 2009, 33.5. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, Brace,1949), 273.6. Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life andTimes, 2 vols. (London: George G. Harrap, 1947), I:105.FINEST HOUR 149 / 61

Churchill QuizJAMES LANCASTEREach quiz includes four questions in sixcategories: contemporaries (C), literary(L), miscellaneous (M), personal (P),statesmanship (S) and war (W), easyquestions first. Can you reach Level 1?Level 41. In which city on 11 November 1944did the crowds welcome WSC withcries of “Churcheel! Churcheel!”? (P)2. Which book begins: “WinstonLeonard Spencer-Churchill was born atBlenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on 30November 1874.”? (L)3. Beaverbrook told Samuel Hoare in1941: “There Attlee and Greenwood, asparrow and a jackdaw, are perched oneither side of the glittering bird ofParadise.” Who was the bird? (C)4. In which year did Time proclaimWSC “Man of the Half-Century”? (M)5. Churchill on 4 July 1918: “When Ihave seen…the splendour of ______manhood striding forward on all theroads of France and Flanders, I haveexperienced emotions which I cannotdescribe.” Supply the missing word. (W)6. In which speech did Churchill say:“The whole fury and might of theenemy must very soon be turned on us.Hitler knows that he will have to breakus in this Island or lose the war”? (W)Level 37. Who said of WSC in 1963, “He isthe most honored and honorable manto walk the stage of human history inthe time in which we live”? (S)8. Of whom did WSC write, “For amonth, at his mother’s house, he lingeredpitifully, until very early in themorning of January 24 the numbingfingers of paralysis laid that weary brainto rest”? (P)9. Why were Churchill’s “rompers”called siren-suits? (M)10. Why is the Preface in all four ofChurchill’s Marlborough volumesdated August 13? (L)11. Who wrote Churchill in1896 that he was “profoundlyimpressed with thevigor of your language, andthe breadth of your views…I conceived a very high opinion of yourfuture career...”? (P)12. After which summit meeting didWSC say: “A small lion was walkingbetween a huge Russian bear and a greatAmerican elephant, but it would perhapsbe the lion who knew the way”? (S)Level 213. When did WSC tell the Commons:“Make your minds perfectly clear thatif ever you let loose upon us again ageneral strike, we will loose uponyou—another British Gazette”? (L)14. WSC broadcasting on 17 June1940: “We shall defend our islandhome and with the British Empire weshall fight on unconquerable until thecurse of Hitler is lifted from the browsof mankind.” What event inspired thisbroadcast? (S)15. WSC to Captain Cuthbert ofHMS Ajax, Christmas Day 1944: “…Icome here as a cooing dove of peace,bearing a sprig of mistletoe in mybeak…” Where was “here”? (W)16. Winston cabled his wife in late1944 about “…haggard Greek facesround the table, and the Archbishopwith his enormous hat, making him, Ishould think, seven feet high.” Whowas the Archbishop? (C)Level 117. Why did Churchill cable Roosevelton 9 March 1941: “Our blessings…goout to you and the American nationfor this very present help in time oftrouble”? (C)18. WSC in July 1943 said that weshould not “crawl up the leg of Italylike a harvest bug, but strike boldly atthe knee.” What did he mean? (W)19. What was Churchill’s last office inthe House of Commons? (M)20. Give the year for the famous photographof Winston, in full riding gear,on a horse at a meeting of the OldSurrey and Burstow Foxhounds. (P)21. In June 1945, whom did Churchillrecommend to be awarded the Orderof Merit and Freedom of London? (C)22. When did Churchill tell Ian Jacob:“It would be a pity to have to go out inthe middle of such an interestingdrama without seeing the end. But itwouldn’t be a bad moment to leave. Itis a straight run in now; and even theCabinet could manage it!” (S)23. What did Churchill mean when hewrote to his mother on 26 January1898: “The balance between Importsand Exports must be maintained”? (L)24. Churchill told Congress on 17January 1952: “There is a jocularsaying: ‘To improve is to change; to beperfect is to have changed often.’”Whose saying did he refer to? (M) ,Answers(19) Father of the House, 1959-64. (20) 30November 1948, his 78th birthday. (21)Eisenhower. (22) 6 February 1943, leavingAlgiers for England in a Liberator, after a day’sdelay due to engine trouble. (23) The balancebetween time spent reading and writing. (24)Cardinal Newman’s: “In a higher world it isotherwise, but here below to live is to change,and to be perfect is to have changed often.”Cardinal Newman was canonised by PopeBenedict XVI on 19 September 2010.(13) 7 July 1926. (14) France asking for anarmistice with Germany. (15) Greece. (16)Archbishop Damaskinos. (17) The Senatehad just passed the Lend-Lease Bill. WSCwas quoting from Psalm 46:1 “God is ourrefuge and strength, a very present help introuble.” (18) To strike at Rome.(7) President John F. Kennedy conferringHonorary American Citizenship on WSC,9 April 1963. (8) His father, LordRandolph Churchill. Winston was to dieseventy years later on the same day, January24th. (9) These suits had been designed forwardens to wear when a siren warned of animminent air-raid. (10) To commemoratethe Battle of Blenheim, 13 August 1704.(11) Bourke Cockran. (12) The YaltaConference, February 1945.(1) Paris. (2) Randolph S. Churchill’sYouth 1874-1900, first volume of the officialbiography. (3) Winston Churchill. (4)In its 2 January 1950 issue, with WSC onthe cover. (5) American. Churchill at theIndependence Day dinner of the Anglo-Saxon Fellowship. (6) On 18 June 1940,anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.FINEST HOUR 148 / 62

REGIONAL AND LOCAL ORGANIZATIONSChapters: Please send all news reports to the Chartwell Bulletin: news@winstonchurchill.orgLOCAL COORDINATORS (USA)Judy Kambestad (jammpott@aol.com)1172 Cambera Lane, Santa Ana CA 92705-2345tel. (714) 838-4741 (West)Sue & Phil Larson (parker-fox@msn.com)22 Scotdale Road, LaGrange Park IL 60526tel. (708) 352-6825 (Midwest)D. Craig Horn (dcraighorn@carolina.rr.com)5909 Bluebird Hill Lane, Weddington NC28104; tel. (704) 844-9960 (East)LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS(Affiliates are in bold face)For formal affiliation with the Churchill Centre,contact any local coordinator above.Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer ChurchillSociety of AlaskaJudith & Jim Muller (afjwm@uaa.alaska.edu)2410 Galewood St., Anchorage AK 99508tel. (907) 786-4740; fax (907) 786-4647Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer ChurchillSociety of Calgary, AlbertaMr. Justice J.D. Bruce McDonald(bruce.mcdonald@albertacourts.ca)2401 N - 601 - 5th Street, S.W.Calgary AB T2P 5P7; tel. (403) 297-3164Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Spencer ChurchillSociety of Edmonton, AlbertaDr. Edward Hutson (jehutson@shaw.ca)98 Rehwinkel Rd., Edmonton AB T6R 1Z8tel. (780) 430-7178Churchill Centre ArizonaLarry Pike (lvpike@chartwellgrp.com)4927 E. Crestview Dr., Paradise Valley AZ 85253bus. tel. (602) 445-7719; cell (602) 622-0566Rt. Hon. Sir Winton Spencer ChurchillSociety of British ColumbiaChristopher Hebb(cavellcapital@gmail.com)30-2231 Folkestone Way, W. Vancouver, BCV7S 2Y6; tel. (604) 209-6400California: Churchillians-by-the-BayJason Mueller (youngchurchillian@hotmail.com)17115 Wilson Way, Watsonville CA 95076tel. (831) 768-8663California: Churchillians of the DesertDavid Ramsay (rambo85@aol.com)74857 S. Cove Drive, Indian Wells CA 92210tel. (760) 837-1095Churchillians of Southern CaliforniaLeon J. Waszak (leonwaszak@aol.com)235 South Ave. #66, Los Angeles CA 90042tel. (818) 240-1000 x5844Churchill Centre ChicagolandPhil & Susan Larson (parker-fox@msn.com)22 Scotdale Road, LaGrange Park IL 60526tel. 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(704) 844-9960Churchill Centre Northern OhioMichael McMenamin (mtm@walterhav.com)1301 E. 9th St. #3500, Cleveland OH 44114tel. (216) 781-1212Churchill Society of PhiladelphiaBernard Wojciechowski(bwojciechowski@borough.ambler.pa.us)1966 Lafayette Rd., Lansdale PA 19446tel. (610) 584-6657South Carolina: Bernard Baruch ChapterKenneth Childs (kchilds@childs-halligan.net)P.O. Box 11367, Columbia SC 29111-1367tel. (803) 254-4035Texas: Emery Reves ChurchilliansJeff Weesner (jweesner@centurytel.net)2101 Knoll Ridge Court, Corinth TX 76210tel. (940) 321-0757; cell (940) 300-6237Churchill Centre HoustonChris Schaeper (chrisschaeper@sbcglobal.net)2907 Quenby, Houston TX 77005tel. (713) 660-6898Churchill Centre South Texasthechurchillcentresouthtexas.comDon Jakeway (churchillstx@gmail.com)170 Grassmarket, San Antonio, TX 78259tel. (210) 333-2085Sir Winston Churchill Society ofVancouver Island • www.churchillvictoria.comMayo McDonough (churchillsociety@shaw.ca)PO Box 2114, Sidney BC V8L 3S6tel. (250) 595-0008Washington (DC) Society for ChurchillChris Sterling (chriss@gwu.edu)4507 Airlie Way, Annandale VA 22003tel. (703) 615-2355Churchill Centre Seattlewww.churchillseattle.blogspot.comSimon Mould (simon@cckirkland.org)1920 243rd Pl., SW, Bothell, WA 98021tel. (425) 286-7364

Alan Turing OBE FRS (1912-1954): He Solved EnigmaAs head of Hut 8 at Bletchley Park, cryptanalyst Alan Turing (pronounced “TWER-ing”) wrote the theoretical description of aprogrammable digital computer before any had been built, and formalized the concept of the algorithm—vital steps towardthe modern computer. Turing also developed the electro-mechanical “bombe” that found settings for the German Enigma key(see Martin Gilbert, pages 20-27). Turing was honored by George VI and pronounced a hero by Churchill, but he was treatedreprehensively by the postwar British government, which disregarded his wartime contributions, and he died by suicide in1954, just short of 42. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official apology on behalf of the British governmentfor the way in which Turing had been treated. Finest Hour honors his memory and his crucial role in winning the war.About the ArtistDaniel Rogers, who painted both covers this issue, was born in Bletchley, resides in Oxford, and has been painting in oils fortwenty years. He is a member of the Alan Turing Year Committee for the 2012 Turing Centenary. His commissions includework for the Bletchley Park Post Office, the Turing Committee, several publications and individuals.“Young Churchill” Cover Portrait Offered to Finest Hour ReadersThe cover painting is offered as a signed print with a certificate of authenticity, at a 15% discount to Finest Hoursubscribers. Go to www.printreegallery.com and enter discount code “Finesthour15” in the “redeem” box at the beginning ofthe payment process. The discount will be automatically deducted from the total. Printree are based at Bletchley and shipinternationally. The originals of both cover paintings, and other historical works, are available from the artist’s websitehttp://xrl.us/bh6q6y. For further information contact Mr. Rogers by email: rogersdaniel1@me.com.