In recent years, millions of Americans have awakened to the fact that their government has lied about almost everything.
As a result of that awakening, many have begun to question long-established historical narratives, and with good reason.
Unfortunately, this broader and generally healthy assault on conventional wisdom has produced collateral damage. Accurate narratives, once universally accepted as true by people of good will, have come in for serious and, in some cases, unfathomable reinterpretation.
The upending of a long-accepted World War II narrative represents by far the most unwarranted of these recent historical revisions. According to the revisionists, posterity has treated Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler with undue harshness. The real villain, those revisionists say, is none other than Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister.
At the risk of creating a straw man — or at least inviting accusations of having done so — I would suggest that one need not attach names to this remarkable new pro-Hitler and anti-Churchill narrative. Suffice it to say that this revisionist view has appeared across social media platforms for more than a year.
In fact, one may trace the most unhinged manifestations of that view to recent developments in the Middle East. Specifically, Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, triggered a Hitlerian revival of Jew-hatred on social media.
Those lost pro-Hamas souls, of course, deserve no serious reply. Instead, may they vanish into history’s dustbin along with the diabolical dictator whose reputation they tried to resuscitate.
A far more formidable challenge, however, has come from revisionists who, though no admirers of Hitler, seek to diminish Churchill.
Moreover, without accepting their judgments against Churchill, one must concede in advance that they have a good prima facie case.
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That case, simply put, goes something like this: Churchill, almost alone among British statesmen, goaded his nation into a war against Hitler, ostensibly to protect Poland in the wake of the September 1939 Nazi invasion, and yet Poland, after the war, fell into the hands of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a more prolific mass murderer than even Hitler himself. All of Eastern Europe eventually suffered the same fate. Meanwhile, Churchill could not prevent the post-war rise of Soviet Communism and the corresponding decline of his own country.
All of those things actually happened, which makes the anti-Churchill revisionist view formidable. Moreover, Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt did more than treat Hitler as a common enemy. They forged an alliance with Stalin. That fact alone renders the Allied war effort a far less glorious affair than many have believed.
When it comes to the anti-Churchill revisionist view, however, the devil lies in the details. After all, that view, once accepted, produces unavoidable inferences that cannot withstand honest scrutiny.
Three Insupportable Inferences from the Anti-Churchill Revisionist View
The revisionist view infers that Churchill erred by leading Britain into war against Nazi Germany; that he, like Roosevelt, effectively kowtowed to the Soviet dictator; and that Churchill ought to have anticipated that the war would result in Soviet dominion over Eastern Europe.
None of those inferences have the least historical justification.
For one thing, Britain’s decision to go to war with Germany over Poland’s borders had nothing to do with Churchill. That decision came in September 1939, and Churchill did not become prime minister until May 1940. By that time, Nazi forces had overrun French and British defenses in northern and eastern France. Thousands of Allied troops survived the Nazi onslaught by escaping from Dunkirk across the English Channel.
From then onward, of course, Churchill almost single-handedly infused the British war effort with defiance. The conclusion to one of his most famous speeches, delivered to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, illustrates the resolve with which Britain’s warriors and civilians staved off Nazi air raids and triumphed over Hitler’s forces in the Battle of Britain:
“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,” Churchill said.
Secondly, Britain’s eventual alliance with the Soviet Union did not make Churchill an admirer of Stalin. Far from it.
In fact, one of World War II’s most revealing exchanges has survived thanks to notes of a conversation transcribed by Charles E. Bohlen, Roosevelt’s interpreter at the 1943 Tehran Conference, a major gathering of the three Allied leaders: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
Bohlen began by describing the deceptively frosty atmosphere at dinner on Nov. 29.
“The most notable feature of the dinner was the attitude of Marshal Stalin toward the Prime Minister. Marshal Stalin lost no opportunity to get in a dig at Mr. Churchill. Almost every remark that he addressed to the Prime Minister contained some sharp edge, although the Marshal’s manner was entirely friendly. He apparently desired to put and keep the Prime Minister on the defensive,” Bohlen’s account began.
Later in the conversation, Stalin casually suggested the physical liquidation of 50,000-100,000 German officers after the war.
“THE PRESIDENT jokingly said that he would put the figure of the German Commanding Staff which should be executed at 49,000 or more,” Bohlen wrote. Roosevelt, of course, did not actually favor murdering German officers. But his flippancy and general deference to Stalin have done the American president no credit in hindsight.
Churchill, however, had a very different response.
“THE PRIME MINISTER,” Bohlen wrote, “took strong exception to what he termed the cold blooded execution of soldiers who fought for their country.”
Moreover, the outward appearance of cordiality could not conceal Stalin’s hostility toward Churchill.
“Although the discussion between Marshal Stalin and the Prime Minister remained friendly, the arguments were lively and Stalin did not let up on the Prime Minister throughout the entire evening,” Bohlen concluded.
In other words, of the two Allied leaders who did not qualify as criminally insane, only Churchill pushed back. The prime minister did not kowtow to Stalin but instead recognized the Soviet dictator as a bloodthirsty murderer.
Finally, there remains the question of what Churchill could or should have known about how the war would end. For instance, had he known that Stalin would control Eastern Europe, would or should Churchill have persisted in fighting Hitler?
That question has validity only from June 22, 1941, onward. On that date, Hitler broke his 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin and launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. That, of course, made Britain and the Soviet Union de facto allies.
In the United States, which had not yet entered the war, prominent voices continued to argue for non-intervention.
“A cold survey of this world situation will show that the dangers of ultimate totalitarian success are very much less than even ten weeks ago. The fratricidal war between Hitler and Stalin is daily weakening both dictators,” former President Herbert Hoover said in September.
Thus, Americans still had good reason to stay out of the war. But could Churchill have said the same about withdrawing from it?
After all, the cataclysmic Nazi-Soviet war did not materially alter the situation in the West. German forces still occupied France, including the beaches just across the English Channel — places like Normandy.
Americans had a good argument for allowing Hitler and Stalin to destroy one another. Churchill, however, did not have that luxury.
Furthermore, one might easily forget the fog of war. For instance, 2007’s “The Forgotten 500,” by Gregory A. Freeman, which chronicled the remarkable lengths that Yugoslavian freedom fighters went to assist American airmen shot down by German forces after bombing runs over Romania, also described the shocking degree to which Communists had infiltrated British intelligence, which often resulted in Churchill having inaccurate information about the real state of affairs in Eastern Europe.
Above all, however, Churchill understood that the Allies simply had to defeat the Nazis.
He knew, of course, that Hoover had it right about the “fratricidal” war between Hitler and Stalin. That war, in ideological terms, pitted national-socialist atheism against international-socialist atheism. Better that both should perish.
Both, however, would not perish. One or the other would prevail. And Churchill, given the situation in nearby France, could not treat the prospect of a Nazi victory with indifference.
Moreover, as bloodthirsty as Stalin was, and as prolific as his career in that department proved to be, his reign of terror, for all its evils, did not include the industrial-scale attempted extermination of European Jews. Hitler’s did. That alone justified Churchill’s determination to defeat the Nazi dictator at any cost.
In sum, one cannot simply dismiss the most honest and formidable elements of the recent anti-Churchill revisionist narrative.
On the whole, however, that narrative, upon closer consideration of its unavoidable inferences, cannot hold up to scrutiny.
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