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2-3 months ago I had lunch with a reporter from Time magazine and he took me out to lunch in
Manhattan and he said Mr Irving before I came out for this lunch I went through our archives,
just to see what there is in our archives of Time magazine on you and one thing that struck
me is until you published your book "Hitler's war" in 1977 you couldn't put a foot wrong
and that ever since 1977 you had buckets of slime poured on you. And I 'm the same author? I write the same
books I do the same kind of research but the trouble is they don't want to read the books i write anymore.
My publisher in London McMillan's, wonderfull publishers full of courage until I wrote the book about Winston
Churchill and then suddenly they became very shifty, very nervous and Howard McMillan said would be..
Unfortunately I have only the beautiful leather bound edition because I sold all the others out
but Howard McMillan said this book will be published over my dead body. So I waited until he died..
This is one of the basic problems that Churchill had in the war years: persuading the Americans to come in and
fight his war for him. Because by 1940 it had become Churchill's War. It was no longer concerned with Poland.
Poland was forgotten as soon as Poland was defeated, but the war by 1940 became a matter of self-prolongation.
It had become important to Churchill's own political reign that the war continue.
Churchill's great nightmare throughout 1941 was that he was going to find himself blundering into war with Japan -- alone.
And that the United States would hang out until the last minute and then not come in. This is written very large in all
of Churchill's deliberations both inside his cabinet and in private. But of course Churchill's deliberations inside his
cabinet didn't mean very much because Churchill's cabinet had about as much brains as the band on the Johnny Carson Show.
You see, Churchill knew that Roosevelt wanted war, but Churchill was familiar with Roosevelt's basic problem:
namely, that the American people did not want war. Churchill did all he could to help Roosevelt out of his dilemma.
We were reading the German submarine codes. We knew where the German submarines were in the Atlantic, so Churchill took pains to ensure
that our convoys coming across the Atlantic, escorted by American ships, would head directly to where the German U-boats were, in the
hopes that the U-boats would sink an American ship. This was the kind of thing that we can see going on now that we're gradually getting
access to all the files. You now begin to understand where the British national interest is: that these things should not be released.
Back in 1938, Churchill's biggest problem was the Ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador in the Court of St. James.
Joseph P. Kennedy, one of my favorite characters of World War Two, father of President Kennedy, who was probably not one of my
favorite characters. Joseph Kennedy was a glorious, Irish, Catholic bigot. Roosevelt had a sense of humor in appointing him to London,
and he admitted that he had only done it as a bit of a joke. Churchill found it anything but a joke when he became Prime Minister.
Kennedy had a habit of reporting back to Washington the truth! When Kennedy went to ask Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, why he shouldn't
have Churchill in his cabinet, Chamberlain's reply was that "the man was very unstable and he's become a fine two-*** drinker.
Churchill knew what Kennedy was reporting because we were reading the American diplomatic
codes as well, and Churchill did everything he could to get rid of Kennedy - by fair
means or foul. In fact, as his diaries make plain (we've got certain fragments of
Kennedy's diaries, which are quite interesting, because he was viciously anti-Semitic,
the Kennedy family won't release the diearies but certain fragments have become known, they 're held in the Kennedy archives in Boston
Kennedy believed that Churchill was capable of stooping to anything to bring the United States in to war. In one telegram
he reports back to Washington that he thinks that Churchill is on the point of bombing the U.S. Embassy in London.
100 yards or so from where I live
He believed that Churchill, in 1940, was about to bomb the American Embassy
in London and claim that the Germans had done it! Later on, in 1940, when
Kennedy decides to go back to Florida for a vacation, he takes the plane down to Lisbon, and he boards the USS Manhattan to sail back across the
Atlantic and in a bit of a panic because he knows who he's dealing with, he's
dealing with Churchill, he sends a telegram to the State Department saying:
Please, will you announce that if the USS Manhattan is torpedoed and sunk, it will not be considered a casus belli, that the United States will not
declare war over this because I have reason to believe that Churchill is
planning to torpedo the USS Manhattan knowing that I'm on board!" Now these
telegrams are not contained in the published volumes of the foreign relations of the United States. I found them in the archives (they are in Suitland,
Maryland), and I quoted them in the first volume of my Churchill biography as well as even more hilarious telegrams in the subsequent volume. They
do show that Kennedy had correctly assessed what Churchill was up to. He was trying to drag the United States into the war by hook or by crook.
In the middle of 1940 Churchill hit on the idea of buying from the United States, 50 World War I destroyers, which were completely
useless, and exchanging them for valuable pieces of British Empire real estate. He gave to the United States bits of the Caribbean
islands, that were our colonies, bits of Newfoundland, and bits of British Guiana, in return for 50 destroyers, that were so
useless, in fact, that not one saw action in World War Two -- except, I think, for the Campbelltown which was only fit to be towed
across the English Channel laden with dynamite and blown up in the French dock gates in St. Nazaire in March 1942. It wasn't a very
good bargain, in other words. In the words of Adolf Berle, the American undersecretary of state, writing in his diary: "With one
single gulp we have managed to obtain a large part of the British Empire, in return for nothing." Namely those 50 destroyers. This
was one of the methods that Churchill was using in an attempt to bring the United States closer and closer to the brink of war.
Another method that he used was far more cynical. As he said to Ambassador Kennedy in June or
July 1940: "You watch, when Adolf Hitler begins bombing London and bombing towns in Britain
like Boston and Lincoln, towns with their counterparts in the United States, you Americans
will have to come in, won't you, you can't just stand aside and watch our suffering."
But he knew from code-breaking, he knew from reading the German air force
signals, which were broken on May 26, 1940, that Hitler had given orders that no
British town was to be bombed. London was completely embargoed. The German air
force was allowed to bomb ports and harbors and dockyards, but not towns as such.
Churchill was greatly aggrieved by this. He wondered how much longer Hitler could afford carrying on war like this. Hitler, as we know, carried on
until September 1940 without bombing any English towns. The embargo stayed in force, we can see it in the German archives now, and we know from the
code-breaking of the German signals, that Churchill was reading Hitler's orders to the German air force: not on any account to bomb these towns. So there
was no way that we could drag in the Americans that way unless we could provoke Hitler to do it. Which was why, on August 25, 1940, Churchill gave the
order to the British air force to go and bomb Berlin. Although the chief of the bomber command and the chief of staff of the British air force warned him
that if we bombed Hitler, he may very well lift the embargo on British towns. And Churchill just twinkled. Because that was what he wanted -- of course.
At 9:15 that morning he telephoned personally the bomber commander, himself, to order the bombing of Berlin -- one
hundred bombers to go and bomb Berlin. They went out and bombed Berlin that night, and Hitler still didn't move. Then
Churchill ordered another raid on Berlin, and so it went on for the next seven or ten days until finally, on September
4th, Hitler lost his patience and made that famous speech in the Sport Palace in Berlin in which he said: "This madman
has bombed Berlin now seven times. If he bombs Berlin now once more, then I shall not only just attack their towns, I
shall wipe them out!" ("Ich werde ihre Städte ausradieren! " ) A very famous speech. Of course German schoolchildren
are told about the Hitler speech, but not told about what went first. They're not told how Churchill set out
deliberately to provoke the bombing of his own capital. And on the following day Churchill ordered Berlin bombed again.
