A Bust Indeed
Paul F. Heller | 22.01.2003 14:33
“He really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me,” Bush said of Churchill, as he promised to place the bronze bust under his favorite west Texas painting in the Oval Office. “He wasn’t afraid of public-opinion polls. He charged ahead, and the world is better for it.”
I chopped that off of a website last week that told this story of a meeting between George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. This is from quite a while ago, actually. The bust of Winston Churchill was a gift to our president. It struck me because an awful lot of Bush supporters have taken to pointing at old Winston as some sort of model for leadership qualities. Honestly, one has to wonder why. But first, we should examine Bush’s quote about the man who so gallantly led merry olde England to the brink of losing World War II.
“He really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me.” Poor grammar aside, put in the context of Churchill’s time a Texan would have been a curious thing indeed. In the 1930s, Texas was a good place to leave, wracked by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The war boom changed all that. By the time it was over, there were Texans doing all sorts of things, from wildcatting for oil and gas to sailboating and (illegally) gambling in the port cities. In between, they farmed chickens and let cattle wander all over the place.
“He wasn’t afraid of opinion polls…” Churchill came to power in the midst of the worst crisis his country had known since the Colonial Insurrection of 1776. I have a very hard time believing that any of his people cared one whit about opinion polls as they huddled in the subway tunnels each night, listening to Nazi bombs destroying their homes above their heads. I doubt very much that anyone was conducting opinion polls, but if they had, one has to think that Churchill would have had good reason to fear them. Militarily, the man was strictly incompetent; the tactic for which he is most remembered was a retreat, when he picked up all his tin soldiers in Dunkirk, where they had been jeopardized by poor strategy in the first place.
“He charged ahead…” What the hell is Dubya talking about? Is he referring to that speech, the only one anyone can remember Churchill ever making, in which he vowed to fight on the beaches and the streets and all that? That was basically a concession speech to his people that all was lost, in principle no different than the Japanese vow to fight to the last man, woman and child. He didn’t charge ahead at all; as I just pointed out, he charged backward. All he really did, if you think about it, is hunker down and wait for the Americans to come over and bail the British out of a World War with Germany, for the second time in thirty years.
“… And the world is better for it.” Well, our part of the world, anyway. Ask the Eastern Europeans if they appreciated being forked over to Joe Stalin at Yalta, courtesy of FDR and, you got it, Winston Churchill. By giving that much power to a man they already knew to be an absolute maniac, they set up a Cold War that cost our nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in the long run, and in the process threatened the existence of every single human being with the everyday prospect of global thermonuclear war. But some Americans’ stock portfolios went off the chart with military-industrial complex investments, so it must be okay.
What most scholars know is that Winston Churchill committed the biggest blunder in military history. It was early in his illustrious career as a drunken statesman, during the gore and folly of World War I. He decided that the Royal Navy should be able to pound its way through the Dardanelles Straits, into the heart of Turkey, in order to seize Constantinople. A grand adventure indeed. The only ones who thought it was a bad idea were the Admirals who had to carry out the orders. That went badly, as the heavily defended Turkish forts blew the normally reliable Navy out of form and out of the water. Churchill switched gears to a ground assault, landing on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli, in order to establish a high point from which to shell the Turkish positions to open up the Dardanelles. It was expected to last 72 hours.
It was a duck shoot from the start for the Turks, who were poorly fed but had all the German weapons they could handle, and had the advantage of high ground. Whereas Churchill believed the soldiers, the majority of which were from India, Australia and New Zealand, would be landing on beaches, they mostly wound up stuck at the bases of cliffs. 259 days and nearly 300,000 casualties later, they packed up in the night and left Turkey for good. The campaign was miserable, with stories of rotting corpses piled high for the flies. The Turks suffered as much as the invading force, if not more, with disease and hunger doing nearly as many of them in as did bullets and bombs.
Anyway. Bush and his conservative followers can idolize Churchill all they want. It only goes to display their lack of historical accuracy, which should cause you to worry, given our climate these days. Some parts of history aren’t worth repeating at all.
I chopped that off of a website last week that told this story of a meeting between George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. This is from quite a while ago, actually. The bust of Winston Churchill was a gift to our president. It struck me because an awful lot of Bush supporters have taken to pointing at old Winston as some sort of model for leadership qualities. Honestly, one has to wonder why. But first, we should examine Bush’s quote about the man who so gallantly led merry olde England to the brink of losing World War II.
“He really kind of went after it in a way that seemed like a Texan to me.” Poor grammar aside, put in the context of Churchill’s time a Texan would have been a curious thing indeed. In the 1930s, Texas was a good place to leave, wracked by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The war boom changed all that. By the time it was over, there were Texans doing all sorts of things, from wildcatting for oil and gas to sailboating and (illegally) gambling in the port cities. In between, they farmed chickens and let cattle wander all over the place.
“He wasn’t afraid of opinion polls…” Churchill came to power in the midst of the worst crisis his country had known since the Colonial Insurrection of 1776. I have a very hard time believing that any of his people cared one whit about opinion polls as they huddled in the subway tunnels each night, listening to Nazi bombs destroying their homes above their heads. I doubt very much that anyone was conducting opinion polls, but if they had, one has to think that Churchill would have had good reason to fear them. Militarily, the man was strictly incompetent; the tactic for which he is most remembered was a retreat, when he picked up all his tin soldiers in Dunkirk, where they had been jeopardized by poor strategy in the first place.
“He charged ahead…” What the hell is Dubya talking about? Is he referring to that speech, the only one anyone can remember Churchill ever making, in which he vowed to fight on the beaches and the streets and all that? That was basically a concession speech to his people that all was lost, in principle no different than the Japanese vow to fight to the last man, woman and child. He didn’t charge ahead at all; as I just pointed out, he charged backward. All he really did, if you think about it, is hunker down and wait for the Americans to come over and bail the British out of a World War with Germany, for the second time in thirty years.
“… And the world is better for it.” Well, our part of the world, anyway. Ask the Eastern Europeans if they appreciated being forked over to Joe Stalin at Yalta, courtesy of FDR and, you got it, Winston Churchill. By giving that much power to a man they already knew to be an absolute maniac, they set up a Cold War that cost our nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in the long run, and in the process threatened the existence of every single human being with the everyday prospect of global thermonuclear war. But some Americans’ stock portfolios went off the chart with military-industrial complex investments, so it must be okay.
What most scholars know is that Winston Churchill committed the biggest blunder in military history. It was early in his illustrious career as a drunken statesman, during the gore and folly of World War I. He decided that the Royal Navy should be able to pound its way through the Dardanelles Straits, into the heart of Turkey, in order to seize Constantinople. A grand adventure indeed. The only ones who thought it was a bad idea were the Admirals who had to carry out the orders. That went badly, as the heavily defended Turkish forts blew the normally reliable Navy out of form and out of the water. Churchill switched gears to a ground assault, landing on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli, in order to establish a high point from which to shell the Turkish positions to open up the Dardanelles. It was expected to last 72 hours.
It was a duck shoot from the start for the Turks, who were poorly fed but had all the German weapons they could handle, and had the advantage of high ground. Whereas Churchill believed the soldiers, the majority of which were from India, Australia and New Zealand, would be landing on beaches, they mostly wound up stuck at the bases of cliffs. 259 days and nearly 300,000 casualties later, they packed up in the night and left Turkey for good. The campaign was miserable, with stories of rotting corpses piled high for the flies. The Turks suffered as much as the invading force, if not more, with disease and hunger doing nearly as many of them in as did bullets and bombs.
Anyway. Bush and his conservative followers can idolize Churchill all they want. It only goes to display their lack of historical accuracy, which should cause you to worry, given our climate these days. Some parts of history aren’t worth repeating at all.
Paul F. Heller
Homepage:
www.hellermountain.com