In 1916, Churchill used his many contacts in high places to wangle his way out of the trenches, during his brief time on active service with the Royal Scottish Fusiliers, to a safe civilian billet in London. Private soldiers were being put before the firing squad for enacting their own personal interpretation of this ambition. Once back in Britain, he remained true to his caddish self. Concerned about the threat to his family of the Zeppelin attacks on London, he bought a country house at Lullenden, in Surrey, where the nasty Germans couldn't get at him.
It was around this time that he uttered these imperishable words to the House of Commons: "My only purpose is to help defeat the Hun, and I will subordinate my own feelings so that I may render some assistance."
And this from the man who had just fled the trenches. Shortly afterwards, he boasted laughingly to friends that he often used precious petrol -- issued to him for ministerial purposes only -- for social trips. He soon moved political heaven and earth (successfully) to prevent his parkland at Lullenden from being ploughed up to produce food, even as the U-boat threat came close to throttling Britain.
As Lloyd George -- no slouch himself in the ego-department -- acidly commented: "You will one day discover that the state of mind revealed in (your) letter is the reason why you do not win trust even where you command admiration. In every line of it, national interests are completely overshadowed by your personal concern."
Quite. As he was to show in 1923, when he secretly accepted £5,000 -- the equivalent of perhaps millions in today's money -- from Burmah Oil to lobby the British government to allow Burmah to collar Persian oil resources.
Churchill was reappointed First Lord of the Admiralty 70 years ago today, and over the next few months he presided over a series of naval disasters unprecedented since he had last been First Lord of the Admiralty 25 years before.
THESE fresh calamities cost the Royal Navy more lives and ships than the US Navy were to lose at Pearl Harbour. Yet you won't read this in any biographies of Churchill, because the power of popular mythology on 1940 has mesmerised even professional historians.
All great men are also crooks and rogues. Churchill's great wartime ally, Roosevelt, was not an exception to the general rule that he who climbs to the top of the tree has used the the corpses of finer men as footholds.
To take up from an earlier column, he embedded corruption in his Democratic Party when he took Joe Kennedy (and Joe Kennedy's $20,000) to his bosom as part of his grand campaign to seize the presidency.
For Ireland, the real war came with Britain's very first blow, when Flt Lieutenant William Murphy of Mitchelstown, Co Cork, aged 23, was shot down and killed in the opening RAF air raid on the German naval port of Wilhelmshaven, 70 years ago tomorrow.
And I'd prefer to hear about simple men like Billy Murphy than grandiloquent and egotistical liars like Churchill and Roosevelt. Why? Because the real truth of war is about the boy-dead who were finer by far than their leaders.
For this is the tale of warfare, as old as the tale of Troy: the man who wins the laurels, isn't half the man of the boy
Source: www.independent.ie
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