A Letter From Winston Churchill’s Disappointed Mother

In a nutshell, the seeds of WW2 were planted in WW1. This is a longstanding human tradition and is in part related to the historical practice of extracting war reparations, but there was other stuff as well that wouldn't, strictly speaking, be classified that way, yet still had a negative impact.

I've read a fair amount of history. I was a history major for a time. My ex was career military and particularly interested in military history and had an extensive book collection. We sometimes looked up the actual battles while watching movies.

The American Civil War is notable for being singular and not the beginning of a series of civil wars. Grant was an alcoholic and ne'er-do-well and this has been credited with his unprecedented choice to set very merciful terms of surrender. Not only were war reparations not extracted, he insisted that the South accept help for rebuilding.

This has been credited with being the roots of similar tactics post WW2 where America occupied and helped rebuild both Japan and Germany.

I hope that's a little clearer. I don't know that it is. I have a raging headache.

1. The UK had a coalition government and a war cabinet of 9 not a Churchillian dictatorship, so blaming it on Churchill is pure hyperbole.

2. Burma fell in 42 from which point Bengal lost previous regular rice imports and was now on the front line with the Japanese. Had Japan reached Bengal the death figures would have been an order of magnitude higher. To hugely understate it, Japan didn't have a great reputation for treatment of populations of countries they occupied. Burma was the location of the infamous Burma-Siam railway that was being built with slave labour, to supply Burma and the expected Bengal front.

3. Many of the Indian states under their respective Maharajas applied trade restrictions with Bengal after the fall of Burma, through 42 starting with Punjab. That significantly heightened food shortages and profiteering. Seeing how prices rose most of the other Indian states joined in. It was the inability to internally import rice that was perhaps the largest single factor. Thanks to the vassal nature of the states under the Raj these decisions were not by the British.

4. Bengal was inundated with half a million refugees fleeing Burma, and thousands more defeated troops. Most were injured and ill.

5. At that point in the war there was little could be done to prevent Japanese attacks in the Bay of Bengal. The War Cabinet did indeed decline Mountbatten's requests for shipping food due to expected shipping losses. The cabinet papers are now freely available.

6. A series of natural disasters in the region, including extensive crop disease, a cyclone that killed 15,000 and spread the disease spores widely, followed by further floods. What was Churchill's part in these?

Churchill had faults, and some appalling decisions in his career that could be easily criticised. The Bengal famine is probably one of the weakest as it is mostly untrue.

Churchill was far more distrustful of Stalin than FDR was. Even if the US sided with the USSR, they would have likely conceded to Stalin more of his goals. Also, without French, Belgian, Dutch, etc. resistance movements and governments-in-exile surviving under British support, the US would have an extremely limited capacity to occupy and rebuild continental Europe, and very little motivation to. Without the Free French movement and Charles de Gaulle, the only seemingly legitimate French leadership after the war would have been the very same government that collaborated with the Nazis, and the Soviets would have just summarily killed all of them and replaced them with their own collaborators.

It's also not entirely clear to me that the US would have joined the war against Germany at all without Britain already being in it. If Britain sued for peace with Germany, they would be unhindered in protecting their empire against Japanese aggression, while the Germans would be unlikely to cooperate with the Japanese against the British. Without Japan attacking either Britain or Russia, there's no reason for a Japanese attack against the United States to provoke American intervention against Germany. Britain's continued belligerency and the escalating American efforts to aid Britain without formally joining the war were necessary parts of joining the two wars into one.

Speaking of which, it also shouldn't be underestimated how deftly Churchill was able to convince the Americans--who had just been attacked by the Japanese, not the Germans--that Germany, rather than Japan, should be their first war priority.

Much of the horror at Churchill, in isolation, is completely normal and justified. The thing is, there isn’t really any single heroic historical figure who is uncomplicatedly heroic. Abraham Lincoln was a de facto dictator who violated the Constitution in order to save it, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who killed people and refused to renounce violence, FDR interned the Japanese and had plenty of his own dictatorial impulses, Martin Luther King was a serial philanderer who plagiarized his doctoral thesis, Washington and Jefferson owned slaves, Isaac Newton was a complete asshole with eccentric and fanatical religious views, and so forth.

So yeah, true, let’s acknowledge the awful things about Churchill. But let’s not over exaggerate them or use them to draw a moral equivalency with Adolf fucking Hitler.