For more than thirty years, I’d occasionally come across harsh attacks against a British historian named John Charmley for writing a highly-critical biography of Winston Churchill, the famed British leader, and that was about the only thing I knew of that author. I’d always vaguely wondered exactly what he’d said about Churchill that had infuriated so many others, and whether his criticism had been warranted, but never had enough of an interest in the topic to investigate it.
Then a year or two ago, I finally got around to ordering Churchill: The End of Glory from Amazon, with a mint copy of his original hardcover edition offered at an extremely attractive price, less than half that of the subsequent paperback version. Unfortunately, the doorstop-sized 750 page tome hardly struck me as casual reading, so it just ended up in a pile of my other books, where it quietly sat for the next eighteen months.
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But with those book-piles growing disturbingly high, I finally decided to whittle them down a bit, and a book as thick as Charmley’s seemed like a good contribution to that effort. So I finally got around to reading it a few days ago, along with more than a dozen of the reviews and other articles it had generated, all of which helped refresh my memory of the half-forgotten controversy provoked by its 1993 release.
As Charmley explained on the first page of his text, he devoted 15 years to the book and since he was only 37 when it was released, he must have embarked upon that the massive research project near the very beginning of his scholarly career, although he also published four other academic books on related subjects along the way.
The bulk of the massive text was a very detailed and solid presentation of Churchill’s political career prior to his 1940 elevation to Number 10 Downing Street, and I found its material quite informative in that regard though sometimes a bit dull.
I’d certainly known that in 1915 Churchill had been driven from the British Cabinet for the terrible Gallipoli disaster that he’d engineered, but I’d had the mistaken impression that his political career had been blighted during the many years that followed. Instead, I discovered that he’d soon returned to office in 1917, and then spent nearly all of the next dozen years in government, holding a variety of highly important positions, many of them near the very top of the political ladder, though his record in these posts was often regarded as less than successful.
Ironically enough, it was instead Prime Minister David Lloyd George—Britain’s victorious leader of the First World War—who was forced out in 1922 and never once regained a government position during the remaining two decades of his life.
The reason for Lloyd George’s political eclipse was the complete collapse of his British Liberal Party, reduced to a mere shadow of its previous standing. Its place on the political spectrum was largely usurped by Britain’s newly risen socialists of the Labour Party, which held power alone or in coalition during most of the 1920s.
The key factor behind the replacement of the Liberals had been the massive expansion of the British franchise in early 1918, removing property qualifications for voting and therefore tripling the size of the electorate, allowing the large working-class to finally play a central role in elections. Much of that working-class voted Labour, and the Liberals disappeared as a result.
Another important factor was the severe political backlash against the horrific human losses that Britain had suffered during the war, with most of the electorate now considering Britain’s involvement to have been a disatrous mistake that they blamed upon the Liberals who had governed during those years. It’s certainly more than coincidental that some of the most important early Labour leaders such as E.D. Morel had been ardent anti-war activists, even suffering years of harsh wartime imprisonment for their views. As a Cabinet member, Churchill had been notorious for his bellicosity, and in the 1922 elections he lost his parliamentary seat to Morel, with Churchill forced to spend the next couple of years out of politics.
The Charmley biography was tremendously rich in detail, and if I’d read it a decade ago, I surely would have missed many of its most telling and almost hidden elements, items that seemed to similarly escape the notice of all the many distinguished reviewers.
For example, on p. 383 the author devoted two half-sentences to a somewhat cryptic reference to what was almost certainly the central turning point of World War II. But since that story has suffered near-total suppression for 85 years by virtually all Western historians, I doubt if even one reader in a hundred picked up on that item:
At the Supreme War Council on 28 March…Chamberlain had put forward a number of plans for offensive operations. These included a scheme of Churchill’s…and a plan for attacking the Baku oilfields in Russia from which Germany obtained much of her oil…attacking the Baku fields, although a more attractive prospect, involved the risk of war with Russia.
That extremely brief mention refers to the very serious plans that the Allies—the British and French—made during the early months of 1940 to launch a massive attack against Stalin’s Soviet Union. Code named “Operation Pike,” they intended to use their Middle Eastern airbases to unleash the largest strategic bombing offensive in the history of the world against the Soviet oil fields of Baku, while they also made diplomatic efforts to enlist the Turks and perhaps the Iranians into joining the Allied attack against the USSR.
As the declassified documents eventually showed, the Allies mistakenly regarded the Soviets as Hitler’s weak and vulnerable ally, constituting the “soft underbelly” of the powerful German war machine. They incorrectly believed that several weeks of aerial bombardment would be sufficient to totally destroy the Soviet oil facilities, thereby cutting Germany off from its main supply of that vital commodity. Furthermore, the heavily mechanized nature of Soviet agriculture would mean that the loss of those oil supplies might well produce a huge Soviet famine, perhaps leading to the political collapse of Stalin’s regime.
However, all these supposed facts were entirely wrong. Little if any of Germany’s oil came from the USSR, and as the world would quickly discover the following year, Soviet military might was enormously strong and resilient rather than feeble. Moreover, vastly larger and more advanced strategic bombing attacks against oil fields later in the war eventually demonstrated that those facilities were far less fragile and easily destroyed than the Allied leaders had originally believed.
But wartime military decisions are taken based upon existing beliefs rather than produced in 20-20 hindsight. Not only would an all-out Allied attack against the USSR during the first few months of 1940 have certainly failed, but it would have had catastrophic strategic consequences, bringing the Soviets directly into the war as Hitler’s outright military ally and thereby almost certainly ensuring a rapid Allied defeat.
By the end of this preparatory period, unmarked Allied spotter-planes were regularly violating Soviet airspace, drawing up the last-minute list of targets for the bombing offensive that was about to be unleashed, while the attack was only canceled after Hitler’s panzer divisions swept through France in May 1940 and knocked that country out of the war. Thus, as I explained in a 2019 article, Hitler’s attack had inadvertently saved the Allies from a monumental strategic disaster.
Once the victorious Germans occupied the Paris area, they were fortunate enough to capture all the secret documents, and achieved a major propaganda coup by publishing these in facsimile and translation, so that all knowledgeable individuals soon knew that the Allies had been on the very verge of attacking the Soviets. This crucial fact, omitted from virtually all subsequent Western histories, also helps to explain why Stalin remained so distrustful of Churchill’s diplomatic efforts the following year in the months preceding Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.
Furthermore, some of the most far-reaching political consequences of a 1940 Allied attack upon the Soviet Union would have been totally unknown to the British and French leaders then planning it. Although they were certainly aware of the powerful Soviet-aligned Communist movements present in their own countries, only many years later did it become clear that the top leadership of the Roosevelt Administration was honeycombed by numerous agents fully loyal to Stalin, with the final proof awaiting the release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s. So if the Allies had suddenly gone to war against the Soviets, the fierce opposition of those influential individuals would have greatly reduced any future prospects of substantial American military assistance, let alone eventual intervention in the European conflict on the Allied side.
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By any measure, the notion of a 1940 Allied attack against the neutral USSR would have been such a monumental blunder that it probably represented the single most embarrassing element of World War II, and a near-absolute blanket of silence quickly descended upon those facts, excluding them from virtually all subsequent Western histories. The first detailed coverage of that pivotal wartime turning point came in 2000 when historian Patrick Osborn published Operation Pike, an academic monograph based upon declassified government archives that appeared in a respected military history series.
Prior to that, I think the most extensive coverage in any Western book had been found in the 1955 wartime memoirs of prominent Anglo-French journalist Sisley Huddleston, which had causally mentioned the story in a couple of pages, whence I happened to discover it. The whole notion that the Allies had planned to attack the USSR in 1940 and that historical facts of such astonishing importance could have remained totally concealed for generations struck me as so implausible that I assumed the elderly Huddleston was merely delusional until I carefully investigated the issue and confirmed the reality of his remarkable claims.
Charmley only devoted about fifty words to this important topic, but I think that is fifty words more than the vast majority of other Western historians have allocated during the last eighty years, and his extremely brief mention convinced me of a couple of things. First, he was obviously aware of Operation Pike and its importance, but deliberately chose to completely downplay it, seeking to avoid academic controversy. And by absurdly stating that a massive Allied bombing offensive against the USSR “involved the risk of war with Russia” he seemed equally confident that virtually none of his readers were aware of the true facts, or would criticize such a ridiculous characterization of the situation.
