WINSTON Churchill’s primary aim during the Second World War was not to liberate Europe from fascism but to protect the long-term interests of the British Empire, a new book aiming to “totally transform popular perceptions” of the famed prime minister argues.
In Empire First, Graeme Bowman puts forward the case that Churchill actually wanted to ensure that Operation Overlord – the codename for the 1944 D-Day landings that marked the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany – never happened.
Instead, Bowman – who was taught at Strathclyde by the eminent Scottish historian Sir Tom Devine before completing a PhD at King’s College, Cambridge – argues that the war-time prime minister wanted to see major operations launched in the Mediterranean and Aegean to protect the British Empire’s control over the Suez Canal.
“Britain wasn’t strong enough, Churchill wasn’t strong enough to impose his views on [US president Franklin D] Roosevelt and [Soviet leader Josef] Stalin,” Bowman told the Sunday National. “He had to pursue his objections but not by overt means; he couldn’t openly oppose Overlord.
“He never really believed in Overlord until it proved hugely successful. A week after it was a success he was on the beaches being filmed. He was very keen to associate himself with the victory.
“But if you just watch the documentaries on the Second World War that are repeated ad nauseam on TV, none of these issues are raised.
“They just want to regurgitate stuff about Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, D-Day – they don’t talk about the complex relations between Britain, America, and the Soviet Union throughout the war.”
Bowman says that such repeated focus on the British victories has contributed to a “very skewed vision of the Second World War in popular culture”, one which he says has only become more exaggerated as living standards in Britain deteriorate.
“There’s been a greater reliance on flags and myths and symbols to distract people,” he says. “And Churchill is definitely a key symbol of what British self-identity is meant to be.”
The popular image of the wartime prime minister was not hurt by the fact that he was to become one of the first major authors on the Second World War, with access to a host of official documents and inside knowledge to help him do so.
“He was obviously a very canny man,” Bowman says, quoting Churchill’s famous witticism: “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
Through Empire First – which has received endorsements from top historians including Devine and Professor Richard Overy – Bowman says he is not trying to completely destroy the popular image of Churchill which the man himself helped to create, but present a more three-dimensional image of his character and motivations.
Bowman told the Sunday National that he first got interested in the topic after chasing a “fairy story” he had read in another historian’s work.
“I read that according to a well-known historian, Basil Liddell Hart, he claimed that the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers met face-to-face in Ukraine in 1943. That puzzled me. I thought ‘what? they’re in the middle of the war and they’re meeting face-to-face?’.”
So Bowman went to the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London to investigate.
He concluded that while the Ukraine meeting was likely a lie told by “a bored or mischievous” German prisoner of war, there was something to the reports of Stalin seeking to negotiate with the Nazis.
“But again that was a puzzle,” he says. “Why would Stalin be entertaining the idea of a separate peace with Germany?
“It was because Stalin had doubts over the Western allied commitment to opening up a Second Front.”
From 1942 to 1944 the subject of opening a “Second Front” in Europe on which to fight the Nazis dominated allied debate.
And while the Americans and Soviets were keen, it was the British under Churchill who resisted.
“To my surprise, I found out it was Churchill that was less enthusiastic about opening a Second Front,” Bowman says, “And I began to ask why”.
“It clashes with the popular mythology of Churchill, the great champion of liberty and democracy.
“Why is he less keen on opening up this Second Front? There were multiple reasons, but the one that never seemed to get aired at all was the importance of Britain’s empire.”
Bowman says that in writing Empire First he has taken a very different route to other books covering the history of the Second World War.
“Most start off in 1933 with Hitler getting into power, or it might start off in the late 30s with appeasement,” he says. “My book starts in 1874, which is when Churchill was born.
“It analyses 70 years of British and imperial history before D-Day. If you do that you realise that all the statesmen who came of age in that period, like Churchill, like Anthony Eden, had an obsession with maintaining control of the Eastern Mediterranean because of the Suez Canal … [which Eden called] a matter of life and death for the British Empire.”
Bowman says he does not question what Churchill did in the earlier stages of the Second World War, when Britain was fighting for survival, “but once the immediate threat from Nazi Germany receded, once Hitler got embroiled in the Soviet Union after 1941, Britain was able to revert back to its normal practice”.
Professor Devine called Empire First “well-researched, clear, fluent … a convincing indictment of the Churchill myth”.
“It was very satisfying to read such a book on a major subject by one of my former students,” he added.
You can read an extract from Empire First on the front page of Seven Days. Or you can learn more about it, and buy physical or electronic copies, at empirefirst.org.
