This is not a book review…
It’s an ode to biographers instead, and maybe a dirge for the death of an empire. I just finished Manchester and Reid’s Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 (Last Lion #3). Phew! Manchester died before this was finished, and Reid completed the tome. And tome it is. Goodreads had it listed as 1237 pages. That’s a wee bit off because approximately 200 pages are dedicated to notes, bibliography, and index. Still, with about a 1000 pages of real text, all in a tiny, tiny font, this is a marathon for readers. But imagine the years spent writing it! It reminded me of the story of all those Irish monks slaving away and copying the classics while Vikings burned, pillaged, and raped their way through ancient Europe and Eire. They saved Western civilization. The two authors I mentioned recorded some of its darkest moments for posterity.
Mind you, old Winston and FDR don’t come across as saints here (but if the pope can canonize a murdering missionary, we can accept these leaders’ sins as blips for two strong personalities who saved the world from the Nazi horrors); on the other hand, we’re allowed to see a lighter side of Papa Joe, the butcher, a man who set the tone for all the mob-style bosses who have since ruled the Soviet Union and Russia, including Putin. Bottom line: it took those three musketeers and some good generals they commanded, including an aggressive, often self-serving general, Ike, an American of German descent, to beat the Germans. We gloss over history, often turning it into myths, but this book tells it like it is.
OK, that much can be considered a book review of sorts. What I found interesting, though, were the pages about Churchill’s striving to preserve the British Empire. The authors are clear enough, but some of the evidence resides between the lines: the Brits left their legacy on the world, and it’s far from being all good. Even during the war years described (1940-1945) and before, their colonial influence was crumbling. Carving up things after the war led to many problems we’re still trying to solve in the modern world, especially in the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent. And that vast Empire, more about business than anything else, often called upon Americans to come to their aid when they felt their hands were tied, as in the case of toppling a democratically elected government and installing the Shah in Iran, requested by the precursor to BP, perpetrated by the CIA, and ordered by the Dulles brothers.
Much is made of the Brits’ breaking the Nazi encryption code (a recent movie lauded the efforts of Turing, who was basically forced to commit suicide by a homophobic British government, the same government that imprisoned Oscar Wilde, a punishment that led to the great writer’s death). Radar was introduced during the early war years, but it wasn’t mentioned in the book that early British radar was very primitive and desperately needed the American’s magnetron (the same gizmo that powers our microwave ovens).
Of course, in those same early years, the Brits stood alone against the Nazis in the West. FDR was struggling to get past the peaceniks and our own anti-Semitic sentiments. Pearl Harbor, as everyone knows, was a turning point, but a lot of American sentiment was more directed against the Japanese, especially because Churchill’s Pacific policies had led to serious disasters. We often forget that Churchill was schooled in the old way of warfighting when Britain ruled the seas. He had a hard time adjusting.
Because the U.S. is such a nation of immigrants, our links with Britain grow more tenuous every day. Our South and West have mixes from the Pacific and from Latin America, as well as others (Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, for example). In our polyglot cities on the East Coast, we find languages from all over the world. English is the official language, but where it’ spoken, it’s American English with a plethora of various dialects more different from the accepted British norm as Cockney dialect is to the Queen’s idiom. As we head for three hundred years outside the influence of the Empire, our ethnic customs are completely different now. We have no royalty (unless Wall Street bankers are our substitutes), and our cultural mores and quirks are exported now to the rest of the world.
We should see Britain as part of the E.U. now; they should too. The stronger they make that union, the better off they’ll be. There is no hope that they can really play a big role on the world economic stage otherwise—as in those dark days of World War Two, they no longer have the infrastructure and personnel to go it alone, no matter how much they yearn for the good old days when Britain was a world power. Times have changed. We have to adapt; they have to adapt.
Today the British Empire is a shadow of its former self. One can say its last days of greatness were during Elizabeth’s early years when the funny little man in the bowler hat was PM. Parodies of that greatness like the Malvinas fiasco aside, the 20th century history of Great Britain should be a lesson to all Americans. Empires wax and wane; military and business fortunes are never guaranteed. What Churchill did was keep the Brits from being German citizens tyrannized by a brutal regime. That’s his lasting legacy. He might have laid the foundations for the demise of an Empire, but one can also argue that it was inevitable and that he couldn’t have done much about it anyway. The Brits’ future now is with the E.U., and the dominant nation there is their old enemy, Germany. History often takes ironic and unpredictable twists and turns.
[Ready for mystery, suspense, and thrills? Family Affairs, #6 in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” is now available on Amazon. You can read it for free in exchange for an honest review (use the contact page on this website to query me) or by downloading from Net Galley if you’re an “official reviewer” (AKA signed up on Net Galley, I guess). Enjoy.]
And so it goes….
