THE errors about Churchill made by Ross Greer, MSP, and repeated by Alex Orr (Letters, January 30) surely need to be refuted in a newspaper of record.
Their simplistic quotations are corrected in Professor Andrew Roberts’ recent and by no means hagiographic biography, which confirms he advocated tear gas, not poison gas – the terms were often interchanged, misleadingly.
His efforts to relieve the Bengal Famine in 1943 (primarily the responsibility of the local authorities run by Indians) while also facing Japan’s plan to invade India, were praised by many involved, with the evidence documented by another historian Sir Martin Gilbert that “without Churchill the famine would have been worse”.
True, many of his remarks jar with us nowadays, but is Nelson to be forever condemned for proclaiming to his men that “you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the very devil”?
Not surprisingly in the middle of a war against this “monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime”, he did not welcome Gandhi’s independence campaign – and of course the now-sainted Gandhi’s views of Africans were no less racist to modern ears.
Yes, he was flawed, but it is not a “gross oversimplification” that in 1940 he did indeed “single-handedly” inspire the British and Empire peoples (including 2.5million from India by 1945, the largest volunteer army in history) to believe they were capable of delivering Europe from that tyranny. No-one else could have done so. Marshall Zhukov praised the Battle of Britain as the most important of the whole war – and in 1940 the USSR was not even our ally, nor the United States directly involved.
It is also simplistic for Mr Greer to say that Stalin “defeated Nazism too”. Stalin was a Nazi just as much as Hitler was, was Hitler’s ally for the first 22 months of the Second World War – politically, diplomatically, industrially and militarily – and after Soviet troops defeated the German Army’s eastern divisions in 1943-45, he then imposed his version of Nazism on eastern Europe, before spawning it in China and North Korea.
John Birkett,
12 Horseleys Park, St Andrews.
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