https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/churchills-admirable-self-restraint/
In April 2002 The Atlantic published an essay by the Anglo-American writer Christopher Hitchens on Winston Churchill (“The Medals of His Defeats”), which reviewed some of the prominent and recent Churchill biographies and more broadly attempted to critically evaluate his career and legacy. After expounding on what he saw as the “Churchill cult”, fostered by sycophantic, sentimental historians whose works are riddled with turgid prose and hopelessly mixed metaphors, even the arch-contrarian Hitchens was unable to avoid the conclusion that Churchill was a great man.
This view, unsurprisingly, comes down to the events of May and early June 1940. These were the crucial few weeks in which, with the imminent fall of France and the threat of a German invasion of the British Isles, Churchill rallied a defeatist War Cabinet, spurned Hitler’s offers of a negotiated peace and resolved to commit his people to fight on to the end—events that may be fresh in readers’ minds after the recent release of the Churchill biopic Darkest Hour. So despite, for example, pointing to Churchill’s part in battlefield defeats like Gallipoli in the First World War, the ignominious retreats from Norway, France, Greece and Crete in the Second World War, or the inevitable dissolution of the now debt-laden British Empire by 1945, Hitchens writes:
I find that I cannot rerun the tape of 1940, for example, and make it come out, or wish it to come out, any other way … Alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then … Some saving intuition prompted Churchill to recognize, and to name out loud, the pornographic and catastrophically destructive nature of the foe. Only this redeeming x factor justifies all the rest—the paradoxes and inconsistencies, to be sure, and even the hypocrisy.
To what hypocrisy is Hitchens referring? This is surely Britain’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, which he alludes to several times:
The argument about World War II and its worthwhileness is the most apparently settled and decided of all major questions in our culture … Even the standby argument of some anti-Churchill Tories (and others, including George Orwell), about the callous collusion between Churchill and Stalin, seems almost anachronistic in view of the eventual implosion of the Soviet system.