John Lukacs

A Final Chapter on Churchill

I was 16 years old in Hungary in 1940, when Hitler's Germans conquered Europe and he marched into Paris. Few Americans know what it meant to live in the middle of Europe then; few of them know it now. A generation after the war, in 1977, Irving Kristol, founding father of the neo-conservatives, reminisced in The New York Times Magazine about 1940, when he and his friends "were divided between devotees of Stalin and devotees of Trotsky." "It was an authentic intellectual milieu," Kristol wrote, "it was between the Trotskyists and Stalinists in City College that the war of the world was being fought." This, when the war of the world was being fought in the skies over England, between Hitler and Churchill.
Our forlorn hopes focused on Churchill. My mother adored him. I was a budding historian then, silly about many things, and with vast gaps in my knowledge of the world; but one thing I understood then that I have known ever since, which is how close Hitler came to winning the Second World War. What I did not know then was that Roosevelt and Stalin would win the Second World War. What I knew then and what I know now is that Churchill was the one who did not lose it.
Five years later the war was over. I had not lost my life, but I lost my native country; I chose to flee from it to America and to become a professional historian. Ever since then, my memories and my knowledge of May and June 1940 have been burning in my mind, in a symbiotic way: my memories have not faded as my knowledge about history has increased-but are memory and knowledge different? Yes and no.
From dribs and drabs of all kinds of reading, I began to suspect that before Churchill rose to become a heroic figure in 1940 his position was by no means as strong and secure as it appeared but a few months later. But that suspicion was part and parcel of a larger and more definite knowledge, which was that Hitler could have very well won the Second World War in 1940 (and even in 1941); and that, therefore, there was this Last European War, 1939-41, before Pearl Harbor, a detailed and structured history of which ought to be written.
That took me almost six years, interrupted by the illness and death of my first dear wife in 1970. Then I had a stroke of luck. That year, the British goverment decided to shorten the closure of government documents from 50 to 30 years. Thereby the papers from 1940 were made available to researchers in 1971. I spent a hot three weeks in London in the old Public Record Office and found what I wanted-most of all the War Cabinet records of late May 1940. Yes-Churchill's situation before and during the first days and nights of Dunkirk was insecure, to say the least. Most of the Conservatives in Parliament accepted his prime ministership reluctantly; his appointment was followed by disaster after disaster on the fronts; his determination to keep fighting, at no matter what cost, seemed less and less reasonable or promising. But while he was determined, Hitler was hesitant, not quite sure what to do before Dunkirk. Still I could not devote more than two pages to that dramatic contrast; I was, after all, writing a book about an entire continent and more than two years of a world war. Thus, The Last European War, September 1939-December 1941.

A dozen years later I returned to Churchill. My then editor at Ticknor & Fields, John Herman (since then my close friend), agreed to my proposal to write The Duel: 10 May-31 July 1940: the Eighty-Day Struggle between Churchill and Hitler. Again, I spent a fair amount of time in the Public Record Office, now in Kew, found even more evidence than before, and wrote some 15 pages about those crucial days of May 1940. I had an advantage that I had not had in 1971, which was photocopying. But when I finished the final draft of The Duel, I threw the accumulated mess of those photocopied pages away. That was a foolish thing to do, because eight years later I decided to write yet another book, concentrating on a day-by-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour) reconstruction of what happened in London from May 24 to May 28 in 1940.
During those secret War Cabinet sessions there occurred a verbal duel, not between Churchill and Hitler but between Churchill and Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, who-and, let me say, not quite unreasonably-was convinced that Churchill was hotheaded; that, in that given and dangerous situation, there ought to be at least a crack open in the British door, to ascertain what Hitler would want from Britain. But Churchill, warmhearted rather than hotheaded, was right. He pulled through-by a hairbreadth, not more.
Those five days were dramatic. No one knew about the drama beyond the War Cabinet: not Roosevelt, not the Americans, no one among the press lords and journalists in Britain. Five Days in London, May 1940 was a modest success, even commercially. Two days after September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, held it up before the television cameras, declaring how inspired he was reading about Churchill and British courage during the London blitz in 1940. Well, there is not one word about the blitz in Five Days... but no matter: the next day, multiple book orders began to flicker on the screens of the Yale University Press offices in New Haven. "Will your next book be Three Hours in London?" a friend asked. "No, it won't," I said.
But something else was happening. During the years between The Duel and Five Days, I worked on a study of Hitler and his biographers. Among other things, my reading and research confirmed another, related matter, which I had known but to which I had not devoted much attention before: that Hitler hated Churchill more than he hated anyone else among his great adversaries (he had a considerable respect and even liking for Stalin); that many Germans, and not only neo-Nazis, had similar inclinations; that sympathisers of Hitler and of the Third Reich, such as David Irving, have thought it best to whiten Hitler's reputation by blackening Churchill's.
And then, Marlis G. Steiner, a fine scholar and one of the better Hitler bio-graphers, directed me to something peculiar and disturbing. The papers of a high Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller (who may have been brought secretly to the United States after the war by Allen Dulles), were published by a small right-wing publisher in California. They included the transcripts of two secret telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt.

I had known about those. Technicians of the German Ministry of Posts had es tablished a listening post on the North Sea coast of Holland, where they were occasionally able to break into secret telephone lines in London. One transcript of a Churchill-Roosevelt conversation (on July 28, 1943) had been printed in a German collection of documents; it seemed authentic. But this was different. In these Müller "transcripts," Churchill appeared brutal, ordering assassinations, conspiring with Roosevelt about what might happen at Pearl Harbor, etc.
I found his very language implausible. I tried to look into the matter, including a search for the original Post Ministry transcripts in various German archives.
I found nothing.
Then I struck gold. Through Lady Soames, née Mary Churchill, Winston's surviving daughter and now a friend, I got in touch with an Englishwoman who had had the authority to listen in to the secret Churchill-Roosevelt telephone talks as a "censor." She remembered them more than a half-century later. She assured me that the "documents" were false from beginning to end. I wrote a brief article about this skulduggery for American Heritage (November/ December 2002). Alas, there were, and are still, historians who have used the Müller documents for their own purposes. (The great Spanish historian Rafael Altamira y Crevea once wrote that history consists of more than documents-not to speak of falsified ones.)
I did not bother to recount this matter in a small book of essays, Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian, published last year-really my last book about Churchill-which included my own diary entries about Churchill's funeral in 1965, to which I had flown with my 8-year-old son from Toulouse, France, where I had been serving as a Fulbright Professor that year. But during my reading for a long chapter, "Churchill's Historianship," something else caught my attention. I had known that, alone among Western statesmen, Churchill showed a fair amount of sympathy, and even understanding, for the situation of my native country, Hungary, even during the Second World War. Reading and rereading the more than 2,000 pages of his Marlborough: His Life and Times, I was stunned to find that he had written many pages about Hungary in the early eighteenth century, at a time when few, if any, people in Western Europe had the slightest interest in the fortunes and the political conditions of that country. Churchill's writing reflected a rather astonishing amount of knowledge, and also great insight and understanding. Subsequently, I proposed and then gave a talk at the British Embassy in Budapest about "Churchill and Hungary."
It was at that point that a thought occurred to me: Why not name a street after him in Budapest? There would be a proper place for that. The great Chain Bridge, connecting Buda and Pest, planned and commissioned by the great Anglophile Hungarian historical personality, Count István Széchenyi, was built by a Scottish engineer, Adam Clark, after whom a square is still named at the Buda bridgehead. Why not name a "Churchill Bridgehead" on the Pest side?
I took the liberty of proposing that to the mayor's office.
Nothing happened for awhile, and I could devote no attention to it: My darling second wife fell ill and died five months later. Then, another idea: Fly to Budapest and make my proposal again (this time on paper, summing up Churchill's interest and sympathies for Hungary) and then play a trump card. "You do this-and I shall bring Churchill's daughter (also an amateur historian) to Budapest for the inauguration." They jumped at it. No, a Churchill Bridgehead won't work; but an attractive small street, a Churchill Walk, would be established in the City Park. "All right," I said. A great and good friend of mine approached Imre Varga, the now most famous Hungarian sculptor, to make a Churchill bust, to be erected in a small bower along that Churchill Walk, and in time for Lady Soames's visit and the inauguration on June 24 of that year, 2003.
So it happened. There came a social whirl. The Hungarian ambasador and his wife in London gave a dinner for Mary Soames, with a dozen Englishmen and Englishwomen who knew her and me, and what a sprightly occasion that was! Two days later, we were flown to Budapest, gossiping and drinking champagne on the plane. That night, there was a box for us in the Budapest Opera, its in-terior all raspberry-coloured marble, to hear Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades which was interminably long and wearisome, but no matter. The day of the inauguration was very hot, and the mayor spoke at length. Again, no matter. The Hungarian national anthem and "God Save the Queen" were played, and my eyes were full of tears. If only my mother could see this. Is "see" the right word? I believe in another world; but whether she sees it or not, perhaps-perhaps-she'll know.
Two days later, I bid good-bye to Mary. I told her how grateful I was to her, but also that a chapter of my life had now closed. I am not a Churchill specialist, and I shall write nothing more about her father. But now there is a street named after him and a statue of him in my native city. I have done a duty. Things have come full circle. A chapter of my life, in the odd way in which the personal and the professional intertwine, has ended.
Two days after I returned from Budapest, both my fax and telephone rang. Young vandals, most presumably devotees of the former Hungarian National Socialist Arrow-Cross Party, had poured red paint over Churchill's bust, tied the ribbon from a wreath around his neck, and scrawled a swastika and a six-pointed Jewish star on the marker of the Churchill Walk. Was this a coda, or
an epilogue, to that chapter of my life? Or more than that? By coincidence (G.K. Chesterton said: "Coincidences are spiritual puns."), I had just finished reading Günter Grass's Crabwalk, dealing with young neo-Nazis, in which Grass's last sentences are: "It is not over. It will never be." I feel this in my bones and see it, clearly.
And yet: another telephone call from Budapest this morning, as I write. The statue and the marker have been cleaned up in less than a day. A group of citizens has already raised the money for the entire restoration expenses. I am-again-reminded of one of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld's maxims: "Things are never as good-or as bad-as they seem." And history is both the recorded and the remembered past. They cannot be separated, but a historian must attempt to be honest about both.

 

John Lukacs
is a Budapest-born historian, living and teaching in the U.S. since 1946. He is author of more than 20 books including Budapest 1900 (1988), Confessions of an Original Sinner (1990), The Duel: Hitler vs. Churchill 10 May-31 July 1940 (1990), The End of the Twentieth Century-The End of the Modern Age (1993), A Thread of Years (1999) and, most recently, Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian (2004).