Wednesday, November 5, 2014
One of His Drunk Moments?
After Churchill had helped to get Tito installed as Prime Minister in Yugoslavia, one his advisers quickly tried to inform him that this would probably lead to years of Communist rule in the newly (1918) created country. Churchill's terse response to the fellow was, "You intend to live there?" Strange fellow, this Churchill.
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Churchill's military staff talked him out of using gas against Germany in retaliation for the V-1 and V-2 attacks-
"In a secret wartime memorandum, Winston Churchill told his advisers that he wanted to "drench" Germany with poison gas. Churchill's July 1944 memo to his chief of staff Gen. Hastings Ismay was reproduced in the August-September 1985 issue of American Heritage magazine.
"I you to think very seriously over this question of poison gas," the four-page note began. Britain's wartime leader continued: "It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it [gas] in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women."
Churchill's directive bluntly stated: "I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay to use poison gas ... One really must not be bound within silly conventions of the mind whether they be those that ruled in the last war or those in reverse which rule in this." Specifically he proposed: "We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention ... It may be several weeks or even months before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas, and if we do it, let us do it one hundred per cent. In the meantime, I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by the particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across now here now here now there."
Churchill's proposal, which would have meant violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of poison gas, was never adopted. His military advisers argued that gas warfare would divert Allied war planes from the more effective strategy of bombing Germany's industries and cities. Gas attacks would not be decisive, they feared, and Germany would very probably retaliate with devastating effect against Britain. Churchill complained to an associate that he was "not at all convinced by this negative report," but he reluctantly gave in. "Clearly I cannot make head against the parsons and the warriors at the same time," he complained in private."
-we note that had Churchill had
his way, his chlorine would have
been countered by the far more
lethal tabun and sarin nerve gases
then held by Germany.
Second guessing the decisions made in the middle of a brutal war 70 years after they were made is quite easy but making the decisions while your enemy is raining bombs on your citizens is a bit more difficult....I would think.And,retribution is a common response.
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