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Mary's wartime service was spent in an anti-aircraft unit defending London
and environs from the Nazi bombers. Here she is shown accompanying
her father as his aide-de-camp at the Potsdam Conference in 1945. |
I've spent the morning reading all that I can see on Amazon preview of
A Daughter's Tale by Winston Churchill's youngest child, Mary, who is still going strong at age 90 and published this, her seventh book, last year. It's very good reading, and Lady Soames is what my mother and grandmothers would have described as
a lovely person, who has led quite a remarkable life.
Here's a clip from an interview by Andrew Marr last year:
If you're into modern British history, I can also recommend an hour-long interview done by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN in 1999, in which she discusses her then-new book
Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills.
A related thought: I've also been re-reading a book that's been in my possession for many years now,
The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War, in which he chronicles the long, inexorable drift towards war - which happened precisely because the Western democracies were so terrified of repeating the horrors of the 1914-18 war, on an even larger scale, that they refused to stand up to the dictators, or maintain their military strength, until it was all too late.
Of course, the dangers of appeasement are all too clearly seen now, in hindsight. And the lesson was misapplied later by those who should have known better, such as in the Suez Crisis, and to some extent in Korea and Vietnam. On the other hand, it seems to me that by maintaining a more than adequate nuclear defense, the West certainly did forestall any aggrandizing ambitions the Soviet Union may have had, and ultimately hastened its downfall.
I thought of all these things the other day when I was reading an article in the
Telegraph about the current debate over renewing Britain's Trident nuclear submarine defense - at a cost of many billions of dollars to the British taxpayer, of course. I was struck by one particular comment some reader left on that article, to the effect that, "Well I don't see anybody planning to start another world war, so why should we spend all that money on a system that will never be of any use."
Oh but children, the course of human events takes many strange, unexpected twists. Who foresaw 9/11 or the Crash of 2008, huh? And now the rotten aroma of the
1936 Berlin Olympics wafts across the ocean from the direction of Moscow. There's no exact parallel between Putin and Hitler here, and I'm not implying there is one; but take a look at
the map of antigay countries, and you'll find a huge block conveniently extending from Russia through most of Africa and Asia.
Granted, that covers a lot of very different political and religious systems; but history makes strange bedfellows. Nor am I saying anyone would go to war specifically over the the gays - Hitler did not go to war just so he could kill the Jews, there was more to it than that. And ruthless cruelty is not extinct in this old world. Better to keep one's guard up than to have no power of resistance or deterrence at all, is what I'm saying.
Again, if the subject interests you, read
Churchill's magisterial 1955 speech on Britain's decision to develop a hydrogen bomb, and see what parallels you can find with the present time.
