Latest round of Churchill bashing

[Sheldrake]

Hello

The TIK fellow on YouTube has just released a clip lambasting Churchill.

Please let me know what you think.

https://youtu.be/z2c7d5RfkAA

Much of his criticism is accurate. Churchill fancied himself as a military strategist, a reincarnation of his ancestor John Churchill. Churchill served for a few years as a very junior officer, mainly as a glory hunting war tourist.

Although at a rational level he understood that Britain would wage a material war expending steel not blood. Churchill was frustrated by the slow build up of resources and never grasped the implications of logistics or even terrain. As one of his biographer notes Churchill was attracted to gallant heroes who promised to achieve feats of daring do. People like David Beatty, Louis Mountbatten and Orde Wingate and he fastened onto all manner of technological gimmicks. Some like radar and portable harbours were effective. Others like aerial minefields didn't.

Churchill mistrusted his Generals - and as the video pointed out Churchill was a big part of the problems that the British experienced in Norway. He made life very difficult for Wavell in 1941 expecting him to do far more than was possible with very limited resources, committing much of the Middle East Forces to a doomed campaign in Greece.

BUT....

Only Churchill was ready to lead the country to defy Hitler in pursuit of victory when all seemed lost in 1940. His policy of buggering on in the hope that the US would come to the rescue bore fruit.

Churchill was willing to pick people for his team who would argue their case. Brooke is a good example. He also picked his wartime cabinet from people who held very different political views. Internal affairs were largely run by Labour politicians Atlee, Morrison and Bevan. He was a good leader of a coalition government and accountable to parliament. Check the debates in Hansard.

Churchill's aggressive instincts were sound. E.g. there has been criticism of the value of commando raids. However, of you look at the impact these had on the Germans, was in retrospect severe, with much resources in the West wasted.

[CogCalgary]

Really good thing that American NCR Corp was able to brute force crack the Enigma codes and locate the milk cows.Churchill started fights that he couldn't finish.

What an odd thing to say or believe. The first U.S. Navy Bombes, Adam and Eve, built by NCR achieved its first decrypt on 22 June 1943.

There were eight "Milch Kühe" Typ-X. Six were sunk in Kriegsmarine service. U-116 was lost October 1942, U-118 on 12 June 1943, U-119 on 24 June 1943, U-117 on 7 August 1943, U-220 on 28 October 1943, and U-223 on 5 July 1944. Only U-117 and U-118 were sunk as a result of ULTRA intercepts.

There were ten "Milch Kühe" Typ-XIV. All were sunk, U-464 on 20 August 1942, U-463 on 16 May 1943, U-487 on 13 July 1943, U-459 on 24 July 1943, U-462 on 30 July 1943, U-461 on 30 July 1943, U-489 on 4 August 1943, U-460 on 4 October 1943, U-488 on 26 April 1944, and U-490 on 12 June 1944. None of them was as a consequence of ULTRA intercepts.

Only U-117 could have been sunk as a result of an ENIGMA decrypt by a U.S. Navy/NCR Bombe.

Surprise attacks in the mid Atlantic were just luck?
The Cult of Turing is strong.
I have the first intercept as June 5 1943.Internet.

[Richard Anderson]

Surprise attacks in the mid Atlantic were just luck?

Straw man much?

No, these attacks in the Atlantic were a combination of deploying more land-based and CVE-based air, HF-DF, and patience.

The Cult of Turing is strong.

Non sequiter much?

I have the first intercept as June 5 1943.Internet.

The first intercept was breaking into the OFFIZIER settings for 9 and 10 June 1943.

[CogCalgary]

www.jproc.ca/crypto/dayton_cb.html
June 5 1943
Intel from Building 26 at NCR Dayton Ohio.
Ultra would not come to light till 1992 due to a directive from President Bill Clinton.
Intel was 17 subs were in the area 35 deg N,45 deg W.
An Avenger dive bomber and a Wildcat from the USS Bogue sank U-217.The day before pilots from the Bogue had damaged and scattered three other U-boats.
Pilots had no idea where the Intel originated from.

Little problem was chief engineer Desch had a German born mother and aunt and was under constant surveillance.

[Imad]

Good thing the Americans were there to back up the Brits.Thankfully he didn't get around to the period after the war in Kenya while Churchill was PM.

Good thing he was around to stop Marshall and Co from launching a crosschannel attack in 1942. The Germans would probably have made mincemeat of the invasion force.

Good thing he was around to persuade Roosevelt to adopt the Germany first strategy. God knows how much longer the war would have lasted.

Good thing he was around to persuade the Americans to gain invaluable combat experience, especially amphibious warfare, by insisting on prioritizing the Mediterranean and Italy.

Really good thing that American NCR Corp was able to brute force crack the Enigma codes and locate the milk cows.Churchill started fights that he couldn't finish.

What fights did he start?

The real war.Not the phoney war.

Churchill wasn't even the PM when Britain and France declared war on Germany.

So again, what fights did he start?

[Imad]

Hello

The TIK fellow on YouTube has just released a clip lambasting Churchill.

Please let me know what you think.

https://youtu.be/z2c7d5RfkAA

Much of his criticism is accurate. Churchill fancied himself as a military strategist, a reincarnation of his ancestor John Churchill. Churchill served for a few years as a very junior officer, mainly as a glory hunting war tourist.

Although at a rational level he understood that Britain would wage a material war expending steel not blood. Churchill was frustrated by the slow build up of resources and never grasped the implications of logistics or even terrain. As one of his biographer notes Churchill was attracted to gallant heroes who promised to achieve feats of daring do. People like David Beatty, Louis Mountbatten and Orde Wingate and he fastened onto all manner of technological gimmicks. Some like radar and portable harbours were effective. Others like aerial minefields didn't.

Churchill mistrusted his Generals - and as the video pointed out Churchill was a big part of the problems that the British experienced in Norway. He made life very difficult for Wavell in 1941 expecting him to do far more than was possible with very limited resources, committing much of the Middle East Forces to a doomed campaign in Greece.

BUT....

Only Churchill was ready to lead the country to defy Hitler in pursuit of victory when all seemed lost in 1940. His policy of buggering on in the hope that the US would come to the rescue bore fruit.

Churchill was willing to pick people for his team who would argue their case. Brooke is a good example. He also picked his wartime cabinet from people who held very different political views. Internal affairs were largely run by Labour politicians Atlee, Morrison and Bevan. He was a good leader of a coalition government and accountable to parliament. Check the debates in Hansard.

Churchill's aggressive instincts were sound. E.g. there has been criticism of the value of commando raids. However, of you look at the impact these had on the Germans, was in retrospect severe, with much resources in the West wasted.

You're perfectly right and I have no problem with accurate postwar evaluation, but, as I pointed out in the comments section, I do have a problem with his calling Churchill an idiot. Cheap clickbait tactic.

No public figure is infallible and God knows Winston deserves much criticism, but this type of language is uncalled for and especially unbecoming of a Brit considering the man's overall achievements in piloting Britain through the darkest days in its history and playing a pivotal role in defying and defeating two of the most evil regimes known to mankind.

[Richard Anderson]

www.jproc.ca/crypto/dayton_cb.html

Sorry, but that is a newspaperman's article documenting his findings by interviewing various people about events that occurred 58 years earlier.

June 5 1943
Intel from Building 26 at NCR Dayton Ohio.

No intel came from "NCR Dayton Ohio", actually OP-20-G, until August 1943, and then it was because of the British sharing cribs, which allowed the preparation of strong menus for the NCR Bombes. Aside from random hits by the prototypes Adam and Eve in May and June 1943, no actionable intelligence from OP-20-G resulted until later in the summer, mostly because Adam and Eve couldn't be made to work reliably for more than a few minutes. After considerable engineering work in the summer eventually Adam and Eve were made workable and production Bombes were delivered by Desch's team.

"Because of his [Desch's] engineering skills and the use of strong menus, the NCR Bombe took twenty, not fifty, nor the worst case, 380 minutes, for a run. A major reason was that the British cryptanalysts (and later "G's" experts) were able to supply menus that produced on the average five- or so prints or "stories" per run not 40,000. The menus eliminated so many of the possibilities that the Bombes stopped, rewound, and restarted very infrequently. That saved significant amounts of time." (United States Cryptologic History, Special Series, Volume 6, It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s – 1960s, Colin B. Burke, Center For Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002, p. 111. Declassified and approved for release by NSA on 05-29-2013 pursuant to E.O. 13526. MDR 68543.)

Ultra would not come to light till 1992 due to a directive from President Bill Clinton.

ULTRA "came to light" in 1974 in general terms when F.W. Winterbotham was granted release of his wartime memoir for publication but hints existed as early as 1967 when David Kahn mentioned the capture of the U-505 ENIGMA in The Codebreakers. However, there were no Clinton Executive Orders or Actions or Directives in 1992 releasing any ULTRA information to light, because Clinton was not President until 20 January 1993. Pretty sloppy journalism by Jim DeBrosse. Much of the release of U.S. intelligence pertaining to ULTRA was released under E.O. 12958 of 17 April 1995, which was signed by Clinton but the actual decrypts that did not reveal methods were available at the National Archives much earlier in the late 1980s, albeit you had to literally work in a locked Faraday cage to view them.

Intel was 17 subs were in the area 35 deg N,45 deg W.
An Avenger dive bomber and a Wildcat from the USS Bogue sank U-217.The day before pilots from the Bogue had damaged and scattered three other U-boats.
Pilots had no idea where the Intel originated from.

Nor apparently did DeBrosse know where the intel originated from. It was GC&CS. After the ten-day blackout in March 1943, GC&CS was able to break back into SHARK on 19 March and was able to read traffic almost continuously for 90 out of 112 days through 30 June 1943 using cribs and short signal sighting reports in the Kurzsignalheft recovered from U-559 on 30 October 1942. They were also aided by the British-designed four-rotor Bombe going operational in June.

The attacks on Gruppe Trutz by Card and land-based air was a consequence of OFFIZIER decrypts at GC&CS, not OP-20-G. OFFIZIER was Reservehandverfahren (RHV) - code books solved at Bltechley in June 1941 and were not ULTRA-enciphered - and produced the messages OFFIZIER 1753/23 May and 1106/24 May that led to the attacks on Trutz.

Little problem was chief engineer Desch had a German born mother and aunt and was under constant surveillance.

Which ultimately had no effect and has no bearing on the issue.

[CogCalgary]

Good thing he was around to stop Marshall and Co from launching a crosschannel attack in 1942. The Germans would probably have made mincemeat of the invasion force.

Good thing he was around to persuade Roosevelt to adopt the Germany first strategy. God knows how much longer the war would have lasted.

Good thing he was around to persuade the Americans to gain invaluable combat experience, especially amphibious warfare, by insisting on prioritizing the Mediterranean and Italy.

Really good thing that American NCR Corp was able to brute force crack the Enigma codes and locate the milk cows.Churchill started fights that he couldn't finish.

What fights did he start?

The real war.Not the phoney war.

Churchill wasn't even the PM when Britain and France declared war on Germany.

So again, what fights did he start?

Who was the Minister,to do with air power that Churchill trashed?The one that figured that Hitler was reasonable in the mid 30s?Churchill was gunning for war after that.

[CogCalgary]

www.jproc.ca/crypto/dayton_cb.html

Sorry, but that is a newspaperman's article documenting his findings by interviewing various people about events that occurred 58 years earlier.

June 5 1943
Intel from Building 26 at NCR Dayton Ohio.

No intel came from "NCR Dayton Ohio", actually OP-20-G, until August 1943, and then it was because of the British sharing cribs, which allowed the preparation of strong menus for the NCR Bombes. Aside from random hits by the prototypes Adam and Eve in May and June 1943, no actionable intelligence from OP-20-G resulted until later in the summer, mostly because Adam and Eve couldn't be made to work reliably for more than a few minutes. After considerable engineering work in the summer eventually Adam and Eve were made workable and production Bombes were delivered by Desch's team.

"Because of his [Desch's] engineering skills and the use of strong menus, the NCR Bombe took twenty, not fifty, nor the worst case, 380 minutes, for a run. A major reason was that the British cryptanalysts (and later "G's" experts) were able to supply menus that produced on the average five- or so prints or "stories" per run not 40,000. The menus eliminated so many of the possibilities that the Bombes stopped, rewound, and restarted very infrequently. That saved significant amounts of time." (United States Cryptologic History, Special Series, Volume 6, It Wasn’t All Magic: The Early Struggle to Automate Cryptanalysis, 1930s – 1960s, Colin B. Burke, Center For Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002, p. 111. Declassified and approved for release by NSA on 05-29-2013 pursuant to E.O. 13526. MDR 68543.)

Ultra would not come to light till 1992 due to a directive from President Bill Clinton.

ULTRA "came to light" in 1974 in general terms when F.W. Winterbotham was granted release of his wartime memoir for publication but hints existed as early as 1967 when David Kahn mentioned the capture of the U-505 ENIGMA in The Codebreakers. However, there were no Clinton Executive Orders or Actions or Directives in 1992 releasing any ULTRA information to light, because Clinton was not President until 20 January 1993. Pretty sloppy journalism by Jim DeBrosse. Much of the release of U.S. intelligence pertaining to ULTRA was released under E.O. 12958 of 17 April 1995, which was signed by Clinton but the actual decrypts that did not reveal methods were available at the National Archives much earlier in the late 1980s, albeit you had to literally work in a locked Faraday cage to view them.

Intel was 17 subs were in the area 35 deg N,45 deg W.
An Avenger dive bomber and a Wildcat from the USS Bogue sank U-217.The day before pilots from the Bogue had damaged and scattered three other U-boats.
Pilots had no idea where the Intel originated from.

Nor apparently did DeBrosse know where the intel originated from. It was GC&CS. After the ten-day blackout in March 1943, GC&CS was able to break back into SHARK on 19 March and was able to read traffic almost continuously for 90 out of 112 days through 30 June 1943 using cribs and short signal sighting reports in the Kurzsignalheft recovered from U-559 on 30 October 1942. They were also aided by the British-designed four-rotor Bombe going operational in June.

The attacks on Gruppe Trutz by Card and land-based air was a consequence of OFFIZIER decrypts at GC&CS, not OP-20-G. OFFIZIER was Reservehandverfahren (RHV) - code books solved at Bltechley in June 1941 and were not ULTRA-enciphered - and produced the messages OFFIZIER 1753/23 May and 1106/24 May that led to the attacks on Trutz.

Little problem was chief engineer Desch had a German born mother and aunt and was under constant surveillance.

Which ultimately had no effect and has no bearing on the issue.

Ok,seems you are quite knowledgeable here.
Remind us how many hours the Turing method was taking to decrypt.600 hours was it?Fell free to correct that.
Turing laid the groundwork for modern computer science it seems.

As for Desch,giving credit to a man with German roots was not in the cards .

[Richard Anderson]

Ok,seems you are quite knowledgeable here.

Yes, actual research usually works better than logical and argumentative fallacies.

Remind us how many hours the Turing method was taking to decrypt.600 hours was it?Fell free to correct that.

Like the straw man.

Turing laid the groundwork for modern computer science it seems.

And the red herring.

As for Desch,giving credit to a man with German roots was not in the cards .

And the irrelevant reason.

[EwenS]

Seems to me that a major point is being overlooked in this discussion.

You don’t need to break the U-boat Enigma codes to find out where they were operating and to direct ASW Forces to intercept. The Y service operated a network of shore based direction finding stations. Simple triangulation of these intercepts was enough to allow a plot of U boat positions to be maintained at places like HQ Western Approaches in Liverpool. Not an exact position but close enough.

[Michael Kenny]

From today's Times (Nov 7 2022)


Younger generations no longer view Churchill as a great Briton

Just 58 per cent of over-65s have a favourable view of the wartime PM

During Britain’s darkest hour battling Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill was a beacon of hope. His reputation has since faded, however.

The country’s youngest adults regard the wartime leader and renowned orator as little more than a colonial racist whose policies exacerbated the Bengal famine of 1943 in which up to three million Indians died.

Churchill revisionists say that disaster is one of several black spots that tarnish his reputation. A survey published at the weekend by the Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, reported that the younger generation took a dim view of the former prime minister, who 20 years ago was voted the greatest Briton of all time in a BBC poll.

The study found that only one in five people aged 18 to 24 had a positive view of Churchill. That contrasted with 58 per cent of those older than 65, who had a positive view of the wartime leader whose many biographers include Boris Johnson, who published The Churchill Factor in 2014. The demise in his reputation has been attributed to a trend among secondary school teachers to focus on the less heroic elements of his character.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, who advised the government on the curriculum, told The Mail on Sunday that “the number of people who are not sympathetic to Churchill” was growing.

McGovern said that when Churchill was taught it was often “in terms of the starvation . . . in India and his racist views”. Some researchers, including Madhusree Mukerjee, the author, have pointed to documents showing Churchill’s cabinet was told India’s resources were being bled dry.

It was claimed that rice continued to be shipped from India despite repeated pleas for shipments of wheat in return.

Churchill has been quoted as blaming the Indians for “breeding like rabbits” as part of the cause of the famine.

Others argue that Churchill’s oratory and his success in bringing the Americans into the Second World War saved Britain from a Nazi invasion.

The younger generation might also not be impressed by Churchill’s fondness for a tipple. Young people are reported to be more abstemious than their parents.

[Richard Anderson]

Seems to me that a major point is being overlooked in this discussion.

You don’t need to break the U-boat Enigma codes to find out where they were operating and to direct ASW Forces to intercept. The Y service operated a network of shore based direction finding stations. Simple triangulation of these intercepts was enough to allow a plot of U boat positions to be maintained at places like HQ Western Approaches in Liverpool. Not an exact position but close enough.

Yep. It wasn't just breaking ENIGMA with Bombes. It was working cribs. It was capturing code books. It was HF-DF. It was deploying more HK groups, improving search and attack tactics, and then CVE-based HK groups. It was more land-based air.

[CogCalgary]

From today's Times (Nov 7 2022)


Younger generations no longer view Churchill as a great Briton

Just 58 per cent of over-65s have a favourable view of the wartime PM

During Britain’s darkest hour battling Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill was a beacon of hope. His reputation has since faded, however.

The country’s youngest adults regard the wartime leader and renowned orator as little more than a colonial racist whose policies exacerbated the Bengal famine of 1943 in which up to three million Indians died.

Churchill revisionists say that disaster is one of several black spots that tarnish his reputation. A survey published at the weekend by the Policy Exchange, a right-wing think tank, reported that the younger generation took a dim view of the former prime minister, who 20 years ago was voted the greatest Briton of all time in a BBC poll.

The study found that only one in five people aged 18 to 24 had a positive view of Churchill. That contrasted with 58 per cent of those older than 65, who had a positive view of the wartime leader whose many biographers include Boris Johnson, who published The Churchill Factor in 2014. The demise in his reputation has been attributed to a trend among secondary school teachers to focus on the less heroic elements of his character.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, who advised the government on the curriculum, told The Mail on Sunday that “the number of people who are not sympathetic to Churchill” was growing.

McGovern said that when Churchill was taught it was often “in terms of the starvation . . . in India and his racist views”. Some researchers, including Madhusree Mukerjee, the author, have pointed to documents showing Churchill’s cabinet was told India’s resources were being bled dry.

It was claimed that rice continued to be shipped from India despite repeated pleas for shipments of wheat in return.

Churchill has been quoted as blaming the Indians for “breeding like rabbits” as part of the cause of the famine.

Others argue that Churchill’s oratory and his success in bringing the Americans into the Second World War saved Britain from a Nazi invasion.

The younger generation might also not be impressed by Churchill’s fondness for a tipple. Young people are reported to be more abstemious than their parents.

Kenya.The amnesty that Churchill and his cabinet discussed and approved for all crimes committed prior to January 1955.

[Dupplin Muir]

The problem here is that the Bengal Famine has been blown out of all proportion - primarily because Indian Nationalists did a copy-and-paste of all the lies told by Irish Nationalists about the Potato Famine. This included grossly exaggerating the number of deaths by counting everyone who died in Ireland during the 1840's as famine deaths: someone who died of cancer, or stroke, or heart-attack, or diabetes, or tuberculosis, three years before the famine started is still counted as a victim of the famine. Similarly, Indian Nationalists are just counting all deaths instead of deducting those that would have occurred anyway. The population of Ireland was about 8 million, so you'd expect well over 100,000 deaths each year to natural causes even if the famine had never happened. However, count all those as down to the potato-blight and lo-and-behold you have the 'million deaths' from hunger.

Also in Ireland some people - Catholics as well as Protestants - chose to sell food abroad, but the Nationalists don't want to acknowledge this because it would imply that the Irish were partly responsible for the deaths - and they can't have that as it destroys the myth that the Irish were eternal victims - so they dreamt up the ridiculous claim that the British 'took food out of Ireland', and of course the Indian Nationalists adopted this dishonesty too. The real figures were:

1845: 28,000 tons imported, 513,000 tons exported. Net exports = 485,000 tons
1847: 889,000 tons imported, 146,000 tons exported. Net imports = 743,000 tons

So basically instead of the British removing food they were actually pumping huge quantities into Ireland, which is why less than 20,000 people died. Simultaneously there was famine all across Europe, and far more people died in Belgium, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and elsewhere, than in Ireland. There was a good reason that 1848 became 'The Year of Revolutions' - hunger.