Talk:John Charmley

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This is a little unfair to Charmley (not sure why he hasn't written anything for a decade), not least by quoting criticism at length from a Churchill-enthusiast website, almost to the point of making Charmley seem like a nut. It no longer seems to be on line, but my recollection is that a vigorous debate ensued in which Charmley engaged pretty hard with Langworth's points.

For example, counter-argument to Langworth might run:

• Hitler might well have dealt (although we can't of course know for certain)
• to talk of "immorality" is not helpful (of course no decent person endorses Nazism but Stalin was pretty much as bad, as was Mao - the West did business with both regimes, and you can be clear that a regime is odious without wishing to fight all-out war against them)
• Halifax and the Cabinet most certainly would have backed a compromise peace (it was very much Churchill's personal leadership, backed by Labour and junior ministers, which kept Britain in the war when all seemed lost)
• even if Hitler had taken Moscow in winter 1941 large numbers of Axis troops would have been tied down in the East for years, as had happened in 1918 in fact
• a non-bankrupt Britain would have trundled on as a major world naval and air power for rather longer than 1956 (talk of "the British Empire" confuses the issue - Indian independence was already on the cards by 1940 but places like India and Australia would have remained allies of a more powerful Britain in a way which they didn't in reality)
• to claim that any of this would have left Britain "tied to Hitler" or "undemocratic" is absurd.

And then the counter-counter argument might run that Hitler was a maniac, whose march into Prague six months after Munich proved that he would never keep any treaty, and God help us when he had built atomic V2s etc etc etc.

The End of Glory is also good on other aspects of Churchill's career, eg. lots of detail on the Admiralty and the Dardanelles, on his time as a serious political player under Lloyd George and Baldwin between 1917 and 1929 (he was even tipped as a potential Tory leader when Baldwin lost the election in that year), a period which tends to be neglected in favour of pre-WW1 and post-1930 in most Churchill biographies.

There was quite a bit of discreet praise of Charmley's Churchill trilogy at the time (eg. his 1989 book on Munich is pretty good, stressing how Chamberlain actually seemed to have driven a pretty tough bargain in some of the negotiations, which perhaps shows how myopic politicians can sometimes be), although it is too long ago now to be recalling specific reviews. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.192.0.10 (talk) 17:51, 14 May 2009 (UTC)