In 1922 Churchill lost his seat in Dundee, probably because of his attitude to Russia. Then in 1924, with the Liberal Party sinking, he jumped ship once more and rejoined the Conservatives: self interest and high office always took precedence over political principles. Baldwin made him chancellor, a position he held until the 1929 General Election

Not even his admirers claim that he was any good as a chancellor. His long tenure in that position was marked mainly by his energetic battling against the general strike (which his economic policies helped to trigger off) in 1926. When the print workers refused to work he took over the printing presses of the Morning Post, commandeered stocks of paper from the Times and, with the help of naval personnel and students from London University, produced the anti-strike paper the British Gazette. For good measure he brought in the Irish Guards to protect those involved in the Gazette’s production. In 1931, his imperialist instincts enraged by widespread support for government policy towards Indian nationalists, he resigned from the shadow cabinet. In the years that followed he spent much of his time writing (when he was not making childish, insulting remarks about Ghandi). He had once tried his hand at fiction, but his first and only attempt at a novel was so bad that even he was embarrassed by it. His historical works tended to find fault with others while obscuring his own mistakes and shortcomings. One notable politician said of The Wilderness Years: ‘Winston’s brilliant autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.’ If one wants to get an accurate picture of history one should read more objective historians.

A voice in the wilderness?

‘Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism. Churchill

Legend has it that throughout the thirties Churchill was a lone voice desperately trying to convince uncomprehending British politicians and the public against the evils of fascism and the menace of a Germany re-armed; he was the only one with the prescience to foresee the dangers. What nonsense! Any blithering idiot would be well aware of the danger of a revived, re-armed Germany, still seething from the injustices inflicted upon it by the Versailles Treaty, flexing its military muscles and re-asserting itself in Western Europe as a force to be reckoned with.

Nor is true that Churchill was more vociferous than others in calling for Britain to strengthen its air and military forces, in fact Neville Chamberlain had been advocating rearmament for much longer, at a time when Churchill was calling for cuts in defence. Churchill and most of the leading politicians were not really anti-fascist (the opening quotation comes from one of his books, published 1937). In fact he, like the rest of the British establishment, welcomed Nazi Germany as a buffer between Soviet Russia and Western Europe. With such conflicting ideologies it seemed much more likely that Germany and Russia would end up fighting each other, in which case France and Britain could sit back and enjoy the show.

But Hitler had other plans for expanding the Reich. In defiance of the Versailles Treaty he had built up his armed forces and in March 1936 his army marched into the Rhineland which was supposed to be a demilitarized zone as a buffer between Germany and France; in 1937 his Kondor legion infamously bombed Guernica; in 1938 Germany occupied Austria without meeting any resistance; In 1938, on the pretext that its three and a half million Germans were being persecuted, Hitler annexed the part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland (Poland also helped itself to part of Czech territory) with the acquiescence of Britain, France and Italy.

It was not the fate of small defenceless democratic countries that worried Britain: it was the imbalance of power in Western Europe. It was all very well having fascist Germany as a bulwark against soviet expansionism but it was quite another thing for Germany to get too powerful and become a threat to Britain’s position in Europe and to her colonies. So Chamberlain went off to Munich and returned with his ‘Peace in our time’ scrap of paper. There really wasn’t anything else he could do as Britain was not prepared for war at that time and the British public was not interested in going to war for the sake of a country they knew so little about. Encouraged by his easy successes Hitler decided to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia as well. This was too much. Britain and France guaranteed the territorial integrity of Greece, Poland, Turkey and Romania, hoping that this would put a brake on Hitler’s expansionist policies. Adolph was not impressed.

1939: in the early hours of September 1st the people of Poland awoke to the noise of the Luftwaffe in their skies and the march of German infantry boots in their streets – the Nazi invasion of Poland had begun! Chamberlain immediately formed a War Cabinet which included Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Both France and Britain issued Hitler an ultimatum to withdraw from Poland. The ultimatum was ignored and on September 3rd war was declared on Germany. Those in command in the navy at that time were well aware that it was madness to go hunting for U-boats in the open sea; the best way to defeat them was to combat them when they tried to attack escorted convoys. But Churchill was having none of it. He insisted that the navy must aggressively take the war to the enemy. As a consequence of his idiocy HMS Courageous was sent out into the open sea to hunt submarines and on September 17th it was sunk by a German U-boat. Germany can thank Winston Churchill for its first major U-boat success of WWII.

It is widely believed that Chamberlain and other appeasers were responsible for Britain’s unreadiness for war in 1939, and that Churchill was the ‘voice in the wilderness’, the only one who constantly advocated the building up and modernising of the armed forces, the only one who foresaw the threat of Nazi Germany. This is a myth propagated by Churchill and his cronies, a lie that should be corrected if historical truth is to mean anything at all. Chamberlain was one of the first to call for rearmament and would have fought the 1935 General Election with a policy of improving Britain’s defences but was stopped from doing so by Baldwin. Churchill’s record is somewhat different: in 1920 he campaigned for battleships when those who knew better wanted to switch to aircraft-carriers; in 1925 he opposed reinforcement of Singapore, claiming that the Japanese could never take Singapore by surprise; in 1928 he recommended extension of the 10-year rule (no need to spend extra money on armed forces for at least 10 more years); fought to reduce the naval estimates in 1928 and the army estimates in 1929. As Gordon Corrigan put it in his iconoclastic and well researched book Blood, Sweat and Arrogance: ‘It was only when he was out of office, and increasingly unlikely to regain it, that Churchill underwent a conversion that makes the Black Death look like a minor outbreak of the sniffles, and began to bang the drum of opposing dictators and building up Britain’s military strength. He was right, but he must also take the blame for contributing to that weakness in the first place.

But the tragic loss of HMS Courageous was by no means the only disaster incurred by Churchill’s arrogant and incompetent interference during his time as First Lord of the Admiralty. It was expected that Germany would soon try to occupy Norway and a plan was drawn up involving both the Royal Navy and troops to prevent this happening. But in April 1940, when Germany did invade, attacking at various key points along the entire Norwegian coast, our modern day Nelson again knew better than his admirals. Troops were disembarked and warships were sent in all directions but the right one; Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, in command of the Home Fleet, had his orders cancelled by Churchill and the result was that Germany occupied Norway with relatively little loss.

Had anyone else but Churchill shown such incompetence, even downright stupidity, he would have been sacked. But the farce continued. It was decided that Narvik, in the northernmost region of Norway, must be taken. Churchill wanted part of the Narvik force to be diverted to Namos, about 230 miles south, with a view to taking Trondheim. General Ironside, the CIGS, refused, stating that there were not enough troops for the Narvik expedition as it was. Three days later Ironside was awakened by Churchill at 2am, while the Narvik force was at sea, and told that the navy was to attack Trondheim and 146 Brigade was to be landed at Namos and Andalsnes to form a pincer attack from north and south.

 To divert 146 Brigade in this manner meant it would land without its commander (who was in one of the other ships), with no anti-aircraft guns and without much of its equipment. Ironside explained this to Churchill, but Churchill lied, saying he had the full agreement of the War Cabinet’s Military Co-ordination Committee. The resulting landing at Namos was a fiasco, with the army and navy commanders receiving conflicting orders and Churchill changing commanders, making impossible demands and directing action from hundreds of miles away for a scenario about which he knew nothing. At last common sense prevailed and it was decided that the original plan, to occupy Narvik, should be focussed on and Churchill’s ‘military masterstroke’ of also attacking central Norway should be abandoned.

The navy managed to evacuate most of the troops of 146 brigade against Churchill’s wishes: he wanted the troops to disperse into the mountains and conduct a campaign of guerrilla warfare. Inexperienced and ill-equipped Territorials were to go off into the mountains at a time when the temperature was 40 degrees below, with no training for such terrain and no means of being fed or supplied!? This was folly on an insane scale, even for a commander as hare-brained as Churchill; it betrays not only his stupidity but also his contemptuous disregard for the lives of his soldiers.

Meanwhile the Scandinavian campaign had caught the attention of the House of Commons. Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, speaking with authority, made an impassioned speech in which he blamed everyone except the guilty man himself for the debacle. In the angry debate that followed blame was diverted from Churchill and pointed at Chamberlain. In one of history’s great ironies it was Chamberlain who was forced to resign and Churchill succeeded him as Prime Minister. In the words of military historian Gordon Corrigan: ‘So a debate on the mismanagement of the Norwegian campaign brought to power the man who had been mostly responsible for that mismanagement.’ Narvik was eventually captured by the French, Norwegians and Poles on May 28th, then abandoned in early June. Thus was concluded another inglorious chapter in the career of our great military and naval strategist.