With the new film Darkest Hour about to hit the screens in New Zealand, the focus seems to be on Churchill’s flaws, as opposed to his many achievements.
Paul Mason in the Guardian does say that Churchill was a genius in understanding how to keep working-class radicalism in check.
Mason continues however to propagate the myth that Churchill was solely or largely to blame for the Gallipoli fiasco, “squandering the lives of 45,000 troops through bad planning and hubris”. Having just finished Martin Gilbert’s “Churchill – A Life” it is clear that this assessment is unfair and wrong. While Churchill was certainly involved as a very young First Lord of the Admiralty, the principal failures were on land, not at sea. Lord Kitchener and the then Liberal PM Lord Asquith were as much, if not more, to blame. However, Kitchener and Asquith, not to mention others in the War Cabinet, let Churchill take the rap, a cross he still bears today, as Martin Gilbert shows, wrongly.
Maybe it’s time for a film on the Dardanelles campaign that shows what really happened, not on the ground in Turkey, but in the corridors of power in London, because that is where a great deal of the responsibility lies.
