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Category Archives: Winston Churchill

Placentia Bay, August 1941

14 Saturday Aug 2021

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, WW2

≈ 4 Comments

Earlier this week I had an early morning dentist appointment in midtown Manhattan and afterward went looking for Chartwell Booksellers, an independent bookstore founded in 1983 dedicated to selling books and ephemera related to Winston Churchill. I was only “vaguely” looking for the shop, knowing it was in the general area but not all that worried should I not see it. It did not appear and so I stopped for a quick coffee & croissant before moving on with my day. I next stopped in the public area of a skyscraper to wash my hands when, lo and behold, there was Chartwell Booksellers in the lobby. I did not buy anything but intend to go back. I took a few photographs of the shop windows and texted them to a friend in another state who has a similar interest in the period. This led to a back-and-forth text discussion of the merits and demerits of Churchill and Roosevelt. Needless to say, both men were extremely gifted and flawed individuals whose successes and failures run parallel and still resonate today. Entirely coincidentally my quick visit to the bookstore fell on the eightieth anniversary of the Placentia Bay conference in Newfoundland at which the president and prime minister discussed the war in Europe. It was less than two months after Germany’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union, their ally of nearly the previous two years. The United States was still technically neutral in the war, though earlier in the year in his January 6 address to Congress Roosevelt had laid out his idea of the Lend-Lease project in what is now known as the Four Freedoms speech.

Leslie MacDonald Gill map / via Cornell University Library

The relationship between the United States and Great Britain during the Second World War was more fraught and complicated than most people realize even today. Hiding the fissures is what good diplomacy does. Churchill, Roosevelt, and scores of military and civilian leaders hashed out various logistics from August 9-12. On August 14 the two leaders issued the Atlantic Charter, a basic framework of principles for what both war and peace might look like. In the coming years the Atlantic Charter was often more honored in the breach than in reality. It’s not that surprising given the complexity and fluidity of a war that took the lives of sixty million people and wounded and displaced millions more. Three quarters of a century later it is still impossible to wrap one’s mind around it. Above is an extraordinary piece of material culture: a 1942 map created by cartographer and graphic designer Leslie MacDonald Gill for the British magazine “Time and Tide” with the text of the Atlantic Charter and a map of the natural resources of the “United Nations” that by then were fighting the Axis Powers. The map struck a chord with the British and American publics, so much so that the London Geographical Institute and Denoyer-Geppert Science Company of Chicago mass produced it in poster form in 1943 and sold it by the thousands. In the ensuing decades the “Time and Tide” map of the Atlantic Charter has appeared in museum exhibitions and at trade shows in London, Miami, and elsewhere. One thing I find striking is how colorful it is. I was talking to someone a few weeks ago about how we interpret the World Wars as having been in black-and-white because almost all of the photographs and moving images are such. The people of the time literally saw it differently.

The Sinews of Peace

05 Friday Mar 2021

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill

≈ 2 Comments

Today is the 75th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech. It was on March 5, 1946 at Fulton, Missouri’s Westminster College that the former prime minister gave what is more commonly know as his “Iron Curtain” address. Yes, former prime minister. It is important to remember that Churchill left Downing Street after being defeated by Labour’s Clement Attlee in 1945. Standing there with Truman seated beside him, Churchill was speaking in his capacity as Leader of the Opposition. Whatever his other failings Churchill always saw the dangers posed by Stalin and the Soviet Union, despite the alliance during the war. The Iron Curtain speech met with mixed reviews, some regarding Churchill’s remarks about a threat from Eastern Europe as prescient and others casting his words as those of a warmonger. I can’t say I know that much about Churchill but I would wager that it was this address that led him to return to working on his eventual four-volume “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples,” which he had begun in the 1930s between the World Wars and put down for obvious reason some time around the Blitz. Again though, that’s just a hunch.

That time immediately after the Second World War is fascinating because it is seemingly so close and yet far removed all at once. It is still living memory for some, fewer and fewer every year however. Here is a five-minute excerpt for a late winter’s day of that event from 75 years ago today.

Yalta, February 1945

04 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by Keith Muchowski in Adolf Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Historiography, Holocaust, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, WW2

≈ Comments Off on Yalta, February 1945

William L. Shirer at the Conference on Research on the Second World War, June 1971

I was texting someone earlier today about William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” to ask if he had ever read that large tome. Shirer published his classic history of Nazi Germany in 1960, fifteen short years after the war’s end. The scholarship on the Second World War has inevitably moved on in the six decades since the book’s publication. That’s how it works. You could make a strong case—I would—that the history of the war has not truly been written yet; so much of what we know, or think we know, about the conflict has been filtered through the prism of the events came afterward. Governments and individuals have been using and misusing the history and memory of the war for three quarters of a century now. As I was telling my friend though, despite the inevitable changes in historiography over the past six decades Shirer brought an immediacy to his narrative that cannot be replicated by today’s scholars. Born in 1904, the American journalist moved to Europe in the 1920s to work as a correspondent and to write in the romantic vein of contemporaries like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. It is telling that all three writers were from the American Midwest. In the 1930s Shirer found himself in Germany, where he witnessed, well, the rise of the Third Reich. Among other things Shirer attended one of Hitler’s mass rallies at Nuremberg in 1934 and was in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics. He worked in other European and world capitals as well. It helped that Shirer spoke German, Italian, and French. After the texting back-and-forth with my friend, I ordered a copy of the book online.

I am determined to learn the history and memory of both the war and the Holocaust over the next two years as some colleagues and I move forward on the project I mentioned the other day. I know a fair amount about the 1930s-40s but am working now in a more methodical manner. Shirer’s work began a new phase in Americans’ understanding of the war. In the decade and a half since Hitler’s suicide Europe was rebuilding itself and Americans in their postwar prosperity were in a period of willful forgetting. Essentially everyone was trying to move on and forget. Shirer’s book and the contemporaneous capture, trial, and execution of Otto Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s began to refocus people’s attention on the terrible events of just two decades ago. “Rise and Fall” won the National Book Award and was a Book of the Month Club selections at a time when that meant more than it does today. In other popular culture of the time the Twilight Zone episode “Deaths-Head Revisited,” about a camp commandant returning to Dachau years after the liberation, premiered on November 10, 1961.

Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin with their staffs at the Yalta Conference, February 1945

I mention all this because today is the 76th anniversary of the start of the Yalta Conference, the gathering of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in the Crimea where the three made plans for what the postwar world might look like. Needless to say the three had contrasting visions. I have always been struck at how poor Roosevelt looks; he was failing quickly and would be dead less than ten weeks later. The conference ran from February 4-11, 1945. By the time of V-E Day that spring Truman would be in the White House.

(images/top, National Archives; bottom, Library of Congress)

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