Sunday round-up 14 June 2026

Birthdays for Andy Irvine, Rowan Williams, Steffi Graf and the late Sir Antony Sher, on the day that the first cohort of prisoners from Tarnów were sent to a new camp in Poland

Felicitations on continuing survival to Democrat Representative for Maryland’s 5th District and former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (87), Irish folk musician, Sweeney’s Men and Planxty alumnus and Paul Brady, Christy Moore, Dónal Lunny and Dick Gaughan collaborator Andy Irvine (84), singer-songwriter, keyboardist and Zombies co-founder Rod Argent (81), President of the United States Donald Trump (80), historian and author Harry Turtledove (77), former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge Lord Williams of Oystermouth (76), ex-Labour Cabinet minister and MP and UK High Commissioner to South Africa Lord Boateng (75), musician, songwriter, disc jockey and might-want-to-review-the-stage-name Boy George (65), tennis champion and seven-times Wimbledon winner Steffi Graf (57), comedian and broadcaster Alan Carr (50), director, producer and screenwriter Diablo Cody (48), pianist Lang Lang (44), singer-songwriter and original member and “you know, the ginger one” of Sugababes Siobhán Donaghy (42), actress, Pretty Little Liars star and singer-songwriter Lucy Hale (37) and Little Mix alumna (no, no idea which one) and solo artist Jesy Nelson (35).

Beyond the earthly birthday card now are physicist and engineer Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736), writer, activist and Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811), lawyer, leading progressive, former Representative then Senator for Wisconsin and one-term Governor of Wisconsin Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette (1855), psychiatrist and neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer (1864), popular operatic and lyrical tenor John McCormack (1884), photographer and journalist Margaret Bourke-White (1904), actor and singer Burl Ives (1909), actor, director and Shakespeare activist Sam Wanamaker (1919), author and illustrator Judith Kerr (1923), White House Press Secretary, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Democratic Senator for California, journalist and author Pierre Salinger (1925), author, screenwriter and Provence enthusiast Peter Mayle (1939), novelist, playwright and critic Jonathan Raban (1942), actor, director and screenwriter Sir Antony Sher (1949) and comedian, drag performer and television host Paul O’Grady (1955).

The nightmare begins

The city of Tarnów in southern Poland is an old one. The first settlement at the confluence of the Biała and Dunaje rivers is recorded in 1105 as Tharnow, and by 1229 had become Tarnowo. In 1330, what was still a very modest fortified settlement of only a few hundred inhabitants was granted “Magdeburg rights” by the King of Poland, Władysław I Łokietek (“the Elbow-High”; he was about 5’0”); these were privileges based on Roman municipal and universal merchant traditions, codified by the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I, in the 10th century and forming the basis for town charters, first in Germany then further afield in Bohemia, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland. The following year, a castle was completed on St Martin Hill by Spytko I of Melsztyn, a close adviser of the King and Castellan of Kraków, which entitled him to a place in the Senate.

Tarnów, annexed to the Habsburg Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria after the First Partition of Poland in 1772, expanded rapidly from the mid-19th century as it became a station on the Galician Railway of Archduke Charles Louis, and by 1870 the population was 21,779, rising to 31,691 in 1900. Of those, 40 per cent were Jewish. By the time the Second World War erupted on 1 September 1939, there were around 55,000 people living in Tarnów, of whom 25,000 were Jews. Within a week, it had come under German occupation and from 9-11 September the town’s four synagogues—the Deborah Menkes Synagogue, the Hassidic Synagogue, the Tempel and the Jubilee Synagogue—and its 40 prayer houses were burned.

On 8 October 1939, Adolf Hitler issued a order annexing large portion of western and norther Poland. The remaining Polish territory, including Tarnów, were marked for incorporation into the General Government for the Occupied Polish Territories (Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) on 25 October. Reichsleiter Dr Hans Frank, a 39-year-old lawyer who was Minister without Portfolio in the Reich cabinet, head of the Nazi Party’s legal office and member of the Reichstag for Liegnitz in Lower Silesia, was appointed General Governor of the General Government on 26 October, with the clever, brutally antisemitic Austrian lawyer, Arthur Seyß-Inquart, as his deputy. Tarnów became a Kreishauptmannschaft (district captaincy) as part of Kraków District, one of the four districts of the General Government.

The Jews of Tarnów were quickly placed under repressive conditions. They had been forced to wear yellow Stars of David since 20 October, and in November the German authorities began to impose financial restrictions; Jewish bank accounts were frozen, then on 12 November it was made compulsory for Jewish business premises to be marked with painted white Star of David. Jews between 14 and 60 had to enlist as forced labourers. From the beginning of 1940, Jews were forbidden from moving to other towns, travelling or using the main streets, and restricted from entering districts north of Krakowska and Wałowa Streets and west of Brodziński Street. In April, they were banned from the public parks, and a 9.00 pm curfew was imposed.

As well as Poles and Jews, Tarnów was home to populations of Ukrainians—it had been the home of the government in exile of the Ukrainian National Republic from 1920 to 1923—and Roma (referred to locally and pejoratively as Cyganie). Also arriving in the town, because of its position as a hub on the railways, were Polish prisoners from across the country, while, desperate though conditions were in Tarnów, and getting worse, some Jews who had fled before the German occupation had returned rather than endure the dangers of open country.

Thirty miles south of Krákow, and 80 miles to the west of Tarnów, there was an abandoned Polish artillery barracks, consisting of 22 brick buildings, in the Zasole suburb on the outskirts of Oświęcim. In January 1940, SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand, Inspector of the Security Police and the Security Service for Wehrkreis VIII, the military district headquartered in Breslau (now Wrocław) and covering Silesia and northern Moravia, suggested the disused barracks might serve as a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners. SS-Sturmbannführer Walter Eisfeld, the commandant of Sachsenhausen concentration camp at Oranienburg in Brandenburg, was assessing various sites for new camps on behalf of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate of the SS. He visited the site at Zasole and recommended against its use, but another inspection by his colleague SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss was decisive, and in April, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler approved the location, putting Höss in charge of its development.

On 20 May, 30 inmates from Sachsenhausen, 29 drawn from its cohort of career criminals (Berufsverbrecher) and known as Grünen or Greens from the colour of the triangles they wore on their uniforms as well as one political prisoner, arrived at the new site to act as functionaries for the camp authorities. Bruno Brodniewicz, a 44-year-old from Posen who had been arrested as a “career criminal” in 1934 (no records survive of his offences), was given the prison serial number 1 and designated as Lagerälteste or “camp elder”. The purpose of placing this cadre of hardened criminals in positions of responsibility like block supervisor was the create a hierarchy already operating by the time new inmates arrived, a hierarchy that relied on brutality and violence to maintain order within the camp population.

Today in 1940, the redeveloped site at Zasole outside Oświęcim was ready to begin operation. The previous night, 728 Polish inmates from the prison in Tarnów had been rounded up and detained, then showered and disinfected at a public bath. On the morning of 14 June, they were escorted by SS guards to the railway station. Even though it was early and the streets were deserted, it was becoming a hot and sunny day. The group was officially described as comprising “political prisoners”, but this covered a multitude of sorts. Some were members of the Polish resistance or prisoners of war from the campaign in September 1939, but many were ordinary people—schoolteachers, lawyers, priests, students—who had been captured attempting to cross the German-Soviet boundary to escape via Hungary to France. (Ironically, Paris fell to German forces that very day.)

Almost all of the first group of prisoners were Roman Catholics, although at least five prominent Jews from Tarnów were among their number. At least 67 were underage boys. On reaching the station, they were loaded into third-class passenger cars, and then the train made the journey west to the camp at Oświęcim, taking three or four hours to cover the distance. They stepped off the train onto unloading ramps at a camp which had been given a new name, the Germanised version of the nearby town:

Konzentrationslager (KZ) Auschwitz.

Shortly after their arrival, the prisoners were addressed by the deputy commandant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritsch, who left them with no illusions.

You have come not to a sanatorium but to a German concentration camp where the only way out is through the chimney. If someone doesn’t like it, he can throw himself on the barbed wire. If there are Jews in the transport, they don’t have the right to live more than two weeks; priests, one month, and the others, three months.

Of the 728 prisoners who arrived that day, 298 survived the war, while 272 died. The fate of 158 is unknown. KZ Auschwitz would expand vastly into a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps before its liberation by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945 (now International Holocaust Remembrance Day). In total, 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom 1.1 million were murdered. Although that first transportation included only five Jews, 960,000 would die at Auschwitz, the overwhelming majority—865,000—murdered in the gas chambers as soon as they arrived. The other victims included 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

Among the survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau were Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, Simone Veil and Elie Wiesel.

Anne Frank survived Auschwitz and was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where she died aged 15, a day or two after her sister Margot (19).

Some of those who died were Irène Némirovsky (39), Edith Frank (44), St Maximilian Kolbe (47) and St Edith Stein (50).

Primo Levi, who was an inmate at Auschwitz for 11 months before the camp was liberated, 26 years old when he was freed, said of the horror:

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

Factoids

1. As dear readers will know, before the creation of the modern unified Ministry of Defence on 1 April 1964, during Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s brief premiership, there were three “Service departments”, one to administer and oversee each of the branches of the armed forces. The Admiralty was responsible for the Royal Navy, the War Office looked after the British Army and the Royal Air Force received its political guidance from the Air Ministry. All there were abolished in 1964, but, if you’re interested, the final incumbent departmental heads were Earl Jellicoe, First Lord of the Admiralty, James Ramsden, Secretary of State for War, and Hugh Fraser, Secretary of State for Air. However, only one man ever held all three offices, and it was, perhaps predictably, Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty 1911-15 and 1939-40, then Secretary of War and Secretary of State for Air simultaneously 1919-21.

2. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, he assumed the additional title of “Minister of Defence” and the heads of the Service departments were not included in the War Cabinet. In a House of Commons debate in February 1942, he explained that he had taken on that style, with the King’s permission, “because obviously the position of Prime Minister in war is inseparable from the general supervision of its conduct and the final responsibility for its result”. It involved no new powers, however, “there is nothing which I do or have done as Minister of Defence which I could not do as Prime Minister” and “there is, of course, no Ministry of Defence, and the three Service Departments remain autonomous”. Churchill was assisted by a small staff headed by Major-General Sir Hastings Ismay, Chief Staff Officer to the Prime Minister and Deputy Secretary of the Cabinet, which formed part of the Cabinet Secretariat and was administered on the model of the staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence. When Clement Attlee formed a government in July 1945, he retained for himself the post of Minister of Defence, but the Ministry of Defence Act 1946 created a statutory position “in charge of the formulation and general application of unified policy relating to the armed forces of the Crown as whole and their requirements”. In December 1946, Attlee gave up the post and appointed A.V. Alexander, the Service departments were no longer directly represented in Cabinet, and a Ministry of Defence was formally constituted on 1 January 1947. It remained, however, a small central staff sitting above the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry, with a budget which in the mid-1950s was only around £5½ million (something like £150 million today, as opposed to the MoD’s 2025/26 budget of £62.2 billion). In July 1958, the White Paper on Central Organisation for Defence set out plans to give the Minister of Defence centralised control over the size, shape, organisation and equipment of the armed forces, another White Paper in July 1963 proposed a fully unified Ministry of Defence under a Secretary of State, assisted by a Defence Council, and the abolition of the Service departments. These changes were written into law by the Defence (Transfer of Functions) Act 1964, which came into effect on 1 April that year, and the Minister of Defence, Peter Thorneycroft, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer 1957-58 and would re-emerge as Margaret Thatcher’s first Chairman of the Conservative Party 1975-81, became the first Secretary of State for Defence. Dan Jarvis, who was appointed to replace John Healey on Thursday this week, is the 28th Secretary of State for Defence.

3. Since it has been prominent in the news this week, a few observations about the post of Defence Secretary, which marked its 62nd anniversary this year. Of the 28 people to hold the office, there has only been one woman, Dame Penny Mordaunt (May-July 2019). The longest-serving was Denis Healey (1964-70), whose tenure lasted five years 246 days. The shortest tenure belongs to Ian Gilmour (January-March 1974), who held office for 55 days. Assuming Jarvis can make that milestone, nevertheless a quarter of Defence Secretaries, seven of 28, were in post for less than a year; a quarter (not the same quarter) have also been Scottish. Only one peer, Lord Carrington (1970-74), has been Defence Secretary.

4. While there has only been one female Defence Secretary, three women have served as Shadow Defence Secretary, all Labour: Maria Eagle (2015-16), Emily Thornberry (January-June 2016) and Nia Griffith (2016-20).

5. Just under half of the Secretaries of State for Defence, 13 of 28, have served in the armed forces as either regulars or reservists. Four were decorated for their service—Denis Healey MBE (1964-70), Lord Carrington MC (1970-74), Francis Pym MC (1979-81) and Dan Jarvis MBE (2026-)—while a fifth, Ben Wallace (2019-23), was mentioned in despatches.

6. Two people have been Shadow Defence Secretary twice, Denis Healey (April-October 1964, June-July 1970) and Sir Ian Gilmour (March-June 1974, 1976-79). A father-and-son pairing have also occupied the role, Christopher Soames (February-August 1965) and Nicholas Soames (2003-05). Eight Shadow Defence Secretaries had held or went on to hold the substantive ministerial office.

7. Only one Member of Parliament has ever been elected on an explicit platform of prohibiting alcohol. Edwin Scrymgeour (1866-1947), born in Dundee, was a member of the Scottish Prohibition Party, served on the City Council and first stood for Parliament at the Dundee by-election in May 1908, though he received only 655 votes. He increased his tally of votes at every subsequent election, in January 1910, December 1910, the by-election in July 1917 and December 1918. At the general election of November 1922, he secured his place in history not only by being elected MP for Dundee under the colours of the Scottish Prohibition Party, but doing so by defeating Winston Churchill, then a National Liberal candidate and until the previous month Colonial Secretary in David Lloyd George’s coalition government. Dundee was a two-member constituency and Scrymgeour was elected alongside journalist and author E.D. Morel, the Labour candidate. Scrymgeour was re-elected in December 1923, October 1924 and May 1929, but was then defeated in October 1931 when the two Members returned were the Liberal Party’s Dingle Foot, eldest brother of Michael, later Leader of the Labour Party, and the Unionist candidate, Florence Horsbrugh, who would become the first woman to sit in a Conservative Cabinet as Minister of Education under Winston Churchill from 1951 to 1953, included in the Cabinet from 1953.

8. If you have not seen the current ITV drama The Long Shadow, which tells the story of the six-year manhunt for Peter Sutcliffe, the serial killer dubbed (years before his identity was known) the “Yorkshire Ripper”, I recommend it. Grisly stuff but it captures the period of the mid- to late 1970s and early 1980s very deftly; more importantly, it lays bare the staggering incompetence of some of the detectives at the top of what became Britain’s biggest manhunt. Chief villain is undoubtedly Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, played brilliantly by David Morrissey, whose self-belief and fixation on the audio tapes sent to him supposedly by the Ripper blinded him to other possible suspects and undoubtedly, sad to say, left Sutcliffe at large to continue to kill. There was considerable unease and disquiet at the length of the investigation and its lack of results in the face of a growing list of victims: Sutcliffe is known to have killed at least 13 women and attempted to murder seven, but there have been suggestions that he may have been responsible for up to 22 other murders. This dissatisfaction went right to the top: a memorandum of 25 November 1980 records a meeting the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, had with Willie Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Brian Cubbon, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, in which Thatcher stated that “the local police [West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police] had so far failed totally in their enquiries into a series of murders which constituted the most appalling kind of violence against women” and the matter “was now a question of public confidence”. Whitelaw shared her doubts but noted that the Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, Ronald Gregory, was operationally independent and that the Home Office could not issue orders. However, an officer of the Inspectorate of Constabulary had met Gregory and they had agreed that Oldfield, who had suffered a heart attack in August 1979, would be replaced and a “Consultative Committee” appointed, comprising senior police officers from outside West Yorkshire. Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Hobson, on temporary promotion to Assistant Chief Constable, was appointed to oversee the investigation and form a “super squad”, to which he could bring detectives from anywhere across the country. Hobson had been involved in the hunt for the murderer since the death of his first acknowledged victim, Wilma McCann, on 30 October 1975. The very day the memorandum was written, Sutcliffe was identified to the authorities as a potential suspect by his former friend Trevor Birdsall, although it would later transpire that the police had already spoken to him on nine separate occasions. Sutcliffe was taken into custody less than six weeks later, on 2 January 1981, and charged two days later. What the memorandum does not record is that Thatcher’s exasperation with West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police was so intense that she had expressed an intention to take personal control of the investigation; she may not have been wholly in earnest, but it had fallen to Whitelaw to dissuade her, not merely on grounds of propriety and operational independence but also reputational risk to her and to the police. It is interesting to note, given how she is perceived by some, that Thatcher’s outrage was intensified by a feeling that the police were focused on the identity of the killer and had given little thought or sympathy towards the women who had been murdered and their lives and deaths; the police preferred to group them together as prostitutes—which some but not all were— and treat them as a passive and largely anonymous cohort. (Winston Churchill, who as Home Secretary went to the site of the siege of Sidney Street in January 1911, described in the Metropolitan Police’s official history as “a very rare case of a Home Secretary taking police operational command decisions”, would not have been dissuaded as Thatcher was.)

9. The tape sent to George Oldfield by a man who purported to be—and was believed by Oldfield to be—the Yorkshire Ripper consumed an inordinate amount of attention from the police. It followed three letters, postmarked Sunderland, which had taunted Oldfield and clearly drew from the “Dear Boss” letter sent to the Central News Agency in London in September 1888 and purporting to have been written by Jack the Ripper. It was dismissed almost immediately by many as an obvious hoax, including Robert Ressler of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, but Oldfield was convinced beyond doubt of its authenticity. The man speaking on the tape, identified as former labourer John Humble but known as the time as “Wearside Jack”, had a distinctive Sunderland accent, and the police engaged experts in forensic linguistics and dialectology, including Stanley Ellis and Jack Windsor Lewis of the University of Leeds, to analyse the voice. It was determined that the speaker came from Castletown, formerly a pit village but by the 1970s a northern suburb of Sunderland with a population of a few thousand. Within its own terms, their work was extremely successful: Humble had grown up in Ford Estate, just across the River Wear from Castletown. But Peter Sutcliffe was born in Shipley and spoke with a Yorkshire accent. 40,000 men were investigated by the police on the assumption that the tape was genuine, and an unknown number of suspects dismissed prima facie because they did not have a Sunderland accent.

10. Throughout The Long Shadow, and doubtless in real life too, it is said repeatedly that the police were looking for a suspect with a “Geordie accent”. Of course, they were not: the Geordie dialect, fascinating and rich though it is, is spoken by the population of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gateshead and North and South Tyneside (Wallsend, North Shields, South Shields, Whitley Bay, Tynemouth, Jarrow, Hebburn and Boldon and so on). The dialect or accent of Sunderland and Wearside more broadly, demonstrated very well by the Wearside Jack tape, is Mackem, more closely related to the dialects of County Durham than Tyneside (though distinct from both). A third mode of speech, peculiar to the colliery villages of County Durham, is Pitmatic, as spoken by comedian Bobby Thompson, known as “The Little Waster”.

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” (Anaïs Nin)

1. “Will Badenoch’s war on identity politics succeed?”: my friend and former parliamentary colleague Alexander Horne, writing in The Spectator, looks at Kemi Badenoch’s plans to review equality legislation and in particular the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) established by section 149 of the Equality Act 2010. This requires public authorities not just to eliminate “discrimination, harassment, victimisation and any other conduct that is prohibited by or under this Act” but to take positive action to achieve goals like “advancing equality of opportunity” and “fostering good relations”. Alex argues that the initiatives pursued under the PSED “have often expanded far beyond the original purpose of anti-discrimination law and have become an exercise in ideological box-ticking”; the act itself is a somewhat uneasy combination of prohibitions on discriminatory conduct, with most of which most people would probably agree, and, for want of a better phrase, political activism, which is much more contentious. From his own experience he talks about “an unfortunate focus on intersectionality, ‘white privilege’ and mandatory inclusion and diversity objectives for leaders and managers in Parliament”. These can so often become exercises in self-flagellation by those who spend time apologising for their “privilege”, from which they may have benefited and continue to benefit, while “few focused on working-class individuals who had succeeded against the odds”. I agree with Alex’s argument, and there is a qualitative difference between prohibiting unfair or unreasonable discrimination on the one hands, and promoting initiatives of what is, like it or not, social engineering, however well-intentioned, to right historic wrongs, create a certain “desirable” demographic situation or to undermine long-standing privileges by introducing new ones in their place to undo or overwhelm them. It’s all part of the unrealisable goal of equality of outcome and can just as easily be divisive and counter-productive.

2. “Hike in Defence Spending Collapses at First Contact with the Enemy”: on his Wallenstein’s Camp Substack, Stephen Webb argues that it is too easy to excuse senior military officers from criticism when contemplating the parlous state of the UK’s defence. He is harshly critical of the currently popular metric of defence spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, pointing out that when this was used as a measure of overseas aid spending and put on a statutory basis by the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015, it was “widely criticised as a ludicrous input target that required money to be spent irrespective of what it was spent on”. I have sympathy with the view that what percentage of GDP we spend is a crude metric and it’s important that we spend money efficiently and on the right things. But I’d add two points at least to qualify that: the first is that if we want to persuade the public that we need to devote more resources to defence, we need some easily understood headline measure rather than an elaborate disquisition on capabilities, force structure and geostrategic posture; the second is that we need a rough-and-ready but broadly fair way of comparing different countries, especially within NATO where there are common spending targets—if there is a better metric for quickly comparing different countries, I’m very happy to use it, but I’ve not seen one yet. In general terms (no pun intended), however, his point that the public must be reassured that additional expenditure is used wisely is absolutely right and must be a significant strand of the ongoing discourse.

3. “The Bluestocking 420: Gazing into the abyss”: The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis produces a weekly selection of items of interest—a fine idea, I think—on a broad range of subjects which I find interesting and useful as her interests in some places overlap mine but are not by any means the same. It’s a good way for that reason for me to uncover stories and debates which I would otherwise have missed, and I can only recommend it highly.

4. “What Orwell got wrong about language”: author and Literary Editor of The Spectator Sam Leith on his Substack The Pharmakon takes on George Orwell’s ever-growing reputation as an unquestionable authority on the use of language. I think his April 1946 essay in Horizon, “Politics and the English Language”, is a stimulating and often persuasive read but don’t agree with every jot or tittle of it, and Leith is right to probe some of Orwell’s assertions even for basic internal consistency. He allows that Orwell was a skilled prose stylist and that he had “a real-world moral and political point to make rather than a generalised harrumph about ‘correct English’”, but argues that rules on language, shorn from their context, can easily become arbitrary and that, like anyone else, Orwell was not always necessarily and unimpeachably right. It’s tempting to say that Orwell’s essay glossed by Leith would be a good primer in the use of language, saving that it will never tell you everything you need to know nor will it apply to every case for all time. Such is the nature of language.

5. “How Far is Modern Russia a Prisoner of its Past?”: Mark Galeotti’s new book Forged in War: A military history of Russia from its beginnings to today explains the profound importance of Russian history and the experience of its rulers and population to its contemporary politics and relations with other countries. We often chide ourselves or our countrymen for being obsessed with Britain’s past—“two world wars and one world cup”—but in relative terms we are blank-slate amateurs as you discover when you talk to a Serb about the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, still highly charged and relevant today, and Russia’s past casts a similar shadow. Anyone who doubts that should read Vladimir Putin’s 2021 essay, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which may be junk history but is an exercise in using the past directly as an anchor and motivation for current policies; its arguments are being fought out in real life in the battlefields of Ukraine in a war—sorry, a “special military operation”—which has now lasted longer than the First World War. This is not by any means a justification of Putin’s foreign policy, only a reminder of the old maxim: know your enemy.

From the archives: Winston Churchill resigns, 15 November 1915

In last week’s round-up, I mentioned briefly the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915-16 and its importance in the lives of two Prime Ministers, Sir Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee. Recently there have been two episodes of The Rest Is History (here and here) in which Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland have examined the campaign in some detail. They come to the (I think) unavoidable conclusion that the Dardanelles were a disaster from beginning to end, a bad strategic plan badly executed at a tactical level and badly supplied and equipped. It also showed the British military leadership at its worst; the First World War, we can too easily forget, was a massively steep learning curve for generals and admirals on both sides, and some British generals proved extremely adaptable and ready to learn. Those in charge at Gallipoli, for all that they were placed in a dreadful position by their political masters, also proved mainly staid and unimaginative, and when they did break free of their normal ways of thinking, it was often in operations of catastrophic recklessness at terrible cost in human life.

It is hard to present a case that the vast majority of the burden of failure in the Dardanelles lies with Winston Churchill. It was he who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had conceived the operation as a daring gambit to short-circuit the war of attrition on the Western Front, his was the overoptimism and exaggeration of the possible gains, and his the triumph of bravado and daring over proper planning and a realistic assessment of what a successful outcome would look like, and what it would require.

The last Allied troops were withdrawn from the Dardanelles on 9 January 1916, just under 11 months after a fleet of British and French battleships under Vice-Admiral Sir Sackville Carden had engaged the Turkish forts at the mouth of the passage in an unsuccessful attempt force the straits by naval power alone. The failure of the campaign to deliver a swift and dramatic result had been held another charge against H.H. Asquith’s government and the Prime Minister himself: so radical and clear-sighted peacetime in many ways—the work of Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George and Churchill himself as President of the Board of Trade 1908-10 on welfare and assistance to the poor had been pioneering—Asquith’s administration seemed wrong-footed and hesitant in wartime.

In May 1915, in an attempt to defuse parliamentary criticism of the management of the Dardanelles campaign and of the Shell Crisis, Asquith agreed with the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Bonar Law, and Arthur Henderson, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, to form a multi-party coalition government. The new Cabinet of 23 contained eight Conservative ministers and Britain’s first Labour minister (Henderson became President of the Board of Education), and one of the conditions of the Conservatives for joining the government was that Churchill be removed from his position. Accordingly, 66-year-old former Conservative Prime Minister A.J. Balfour had succeeded him as First Lord of the Admiralty, while Churchill, who had argued his case to stay on with both Asquith and Law, had in some ways been lucky to survive with demotion to the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

Churchill found himself marginalised despite remaining within Cabinet, which had no doubt been Asquith’s precise intention. His salary was reduced, his new office was in Lancaster Place by Waterloo Bridge, almost a mile from Whitehall and he was not even assigned a messenger. His formal duties consisted largely of administering the estates and rents of the Duchy of Lancaster and appointing justices of the peace and other local officers for the County Palatine of Lancaster. Frustrated and depressed, Churchill asked Asquith in September if he could leave the government and go to France to command a brigade on active service. The Prime Minister had no objection—Churchill’s departure from the government and the country would be a convenience to him—but the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, who had long been an adversary of Churchill’s, refused to countenance his presence in the British Army. In November, having asked for and been refused appointment as Governor of the East Africa Protectorate, the British-controlled territories in modern-dyay Kenya, Churchill resigned from the Cabinet, though remained as an MP, and, with Kitchener’s influence on the wane, would shortly be allowed to serve on the Western Front, though not in command of a brigade.

On Monday 15 November 1915, as is the opportunity conventionally available to former Cabinet ministers, Churchill made a personal statement in the House of Commons, explaining the reasons for his resignation. He spoke immediately after Questions and before a debate on a Supply Resolution requesting an additional £400 million for the cost of the war. He began by saying there was little to be added to his letter of resignation written three days before; in this he had noted that he had agreed to leave the Admiralty on the basis that he would “take part in the work of the War Council and to assist new Ministers with the knowledge of current operations which I then possessed in a special degree”. However, the degree of exclusion from the real decision-making processes he felt was evident in his reference to “the counsels which I have offered… upon record in the minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence and in the Memoranda I have circulated to the Cabinet”, with the strong implication they had been largely ignored.

His resignation speech stressed, as a nod to party loyalty, that he was not calling for the dissolution or replacement of the government.

I think it important to point out that those reasons do not apply to any other Member of the Cabinet. No other Minister who does not hold a laborious office, and is not on the War Council, has been so closely connected as I have been with the conduct of the War for its first ten months. In the second place, I alone have open to me an alternative form of service to which no exception can be taken, and with which I am perfectly content.

He claimed, somewhat unconvincingly, that he had entertained reservations about whether he should speak at all that day; if he had, it would surely have been a lifetime first. In the end, however, he had concluded he was duty-bound to do so.

I feel that I ought not to leave this country without dealing to some extent, so far as the public interests permit, with certain episodes and incidents in the Admiralty war direction which occurred during my tenure of office. These have been the subject of much comment in the country, and I have lain under serious reproach in regard to them.

The incidents he identified were the episode around the Falkland Islands in November and December 1914 beginning with the Imperial German Navy’s victory over the Royal Navy at the Battle of Coronel and concluding with the destruction by a British squadron under Vice-Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee of Germany’s East Asia Squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee; the loss of three Cressy-class armoured cruisers to Germany submarine attacks in the North Sea in 22 September 1914; the Royal Naval Division’s failed attempt to relieve Antwerp in October 1914; and, most obviously and pressingly, the Dardanelles campaign, by that stage none months long and clearly failing.

With the first three issues he dealt relatively swiftly, dwelling at a little more length on the situation of Antwerp. In characteristic Churchillian style, he freely conceded setbacks and shortcomings, but did so in a way which managed to attribute to himself no serious blame or misjudgement; indeed, he sometimes seemed to revel in having taken what he believed to have been brave, bold and correct decisions, even when they ended disastrously. His justification of the deployment of the Royal Naval Division at Antwerp was illustrative.

It is quite true that the Naval Division was only made up out of what the Navy could spare and leave behind after the mobilisation took place… They were undoubtedly unfit to manœuvre in the field, but that was not what they were for. They were going into trenches alongside of exhausted Belgian troops and townsfolk, who had received far less training than they had, and who were far less well equipped… I say, there being nothing else in view, I was justified in proposing to the Government to use those troops, in spite of their want of training. Of course, all these matters can only be judged fairly in relation to the great emergency in which we stood. That is all I say about Antwerp.

On the Dardanelles, again, Churchill began with apparent (although apology-free) concessions.

What am I going to prove or try to prove about the Dardanelles? I am not going to prove that we forced the Dardanelles. No amount of argument, however excellent, will do that. Nor am I going to try to prove that the plan we adopted was the best plan that could have been adopted. No amount of argument will do that. Nor, least of all, am I going to try to prove that my responsibility in the matter is not a great one.

His concern was essentially a reputational one: to demonstrate that he had not acted in the reckless and headstrong manner which his detractors believed were intrinsic to his character.

I am concerned to make it clear to the House, and not only to the House but to the Navy, that this enterprise was profoundly, maturely, and elaborately considered, that there was a great volume of expert opinion behind it, that it was framed entirely by expert and technical minds, and that in no circumstances could it be regarded as having been undertaken with carelessness or levity. That, I am concerned to prove. It is important to me to do so, and it is also important in the general interest.

“The general interest” feels like a duty-driven afterthought. He went on to enumerate everyone who had agreed with the operation: the Foreign Office and the War Office had passed on a request from the Russian government to apply pressure to the Ottomans in the Mediterranean in the hope of relieving their own difficulties in the Caucasus; “the First Sea Lord [Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher] and other naval advisers” agreed that the Dardanelles were an obvious place to attempt to strike at the Ottoman Empire (although Fisher was never wholly enthusiastic about the operation); “we all recognised at the Admiralty that a joint naval and military operation by surprise” would be the best way of striking at the Dardanelles (though that was not what at first happened, as it was initially only a naval operation); both Carden, as the senior naval officer in theatre, and Admiral Sir Henry Jackson, head of the sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence responsible for planning expeditionary operations, advised that “the Dardanelles could not be rushed, but could be reduced by a regular and sustained naval bombardment” (though Churchill had vetoed Jackson’s appointmentto succeed Prince Louis of Battenberg as First Sea Lord in November 1914). Churchill concluded that “this coincidence of opinion struck me as very remarkable”.

He went on to argue that Carden had drafted a plan of operations which had been examined in detail by the Admiralty War Staff and approved, or at least not objected to, by Jackson and Fisher. Then he shared political responsibility around generously.

The War Council was immensely impressed with the political advantages of the plan if it could be carried out, and they pressed the Admiralty to find a way to carry it out. No one spoke against the methods proposed. No expert adviser indicated any dissent.

Churchill recalled a meeting with the Prime Minister, from which he came away with the understanding that “the operation was definitely sanctioned, and we were directed to execute it”.

Having dipped almost everyone’s hands in the blood of the Dardanelles, Churchill then presented the first stages of the campaign in an overwhelmingly positive light.

The outer forts were destroyed; the Fleet were able to enter the Straits, and attack the forts at the Narrows. Up to the time that this happened, we had always kept in view the possibility that if this operation, which necessarily depended for its success upon a number of incalculable factors, did not develop as we hoped, and if the obstacles were found to be much greater than had been foreseen, we could convert it into a demonstration, and turn our attention to some other part of the Mediterranean theatre. We had kept in view, and had prepared, an amphibious operation which would serve as an alternative in case we wished to withdraw, so as to safeguard our prestige.

Almost any outcome, it seemed, was a success; he then suggested that the very existence of the campaign had benefited the Allied cause in the Balkans. “A panic was created in Constantinople” and Italy drew closer to entering the war, while the Prime Minister of Greece, Eleftherios Venizelos, was able to face down his opponents, not least the German-educated Prussophile King Constantine I, and edge the country closer to the Allied side.

It was not now desired by anyone to go back, or to ride off on any alternative operation. The eyes of the whole world were riveted on the Dardanelles. Every interest, military, naval, political, and economic, urged the prosecution of the enterprise.

But the campaign slowed as it became obvious just how challenging it would be to force the Dardanelles Strait entirely and how heavily it was mined. Nevertheless, Churchill insisted, Lord Fisher, as the professional head of the Royal Navy, had expressed neither misgivings nor opposition, and his word would effectively have meant that “the operations would never have begun”. When it came to the landings of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at what is now known as Anzac Cove and the 29th Division at Cape Helles on 25 April and the subsequent land-based operations, he took no responsibility “except by what is implied by my having remained a member of the Government”, and, even then, “only subject to my written and recorded opinions, expressed in every case before, and not after the event”. This dramatic shift of attitude had been prefaced by a passage which cannot have seemed to strike quite the right note in an already-hostile Commons.

I can assure the House that the month which apparently had to be consumed between the cessation of the naval attack on 18th March and the commencement of the military attack on 20th April was one of the least pleasant I ever experienced.

One wonders how the British, Anzac and French troops would come to feel about their time in the Dardanelles. Churchill claimed it had been agreed with Asquith’s approval that Kitchener and the War Office thenceforth “assumed the responsibility for the military operations, by which I meant, and said I meant, the measuring of the forces required to achieve success”, and he had transferred the Royal Naval Division to military control in recognition of that handover of authority.

Freed from that burden, Churchill then criticised the conduct of the land campaign. It had lacked “speed and vigour”, allowing the Ottomans to reinforce the Gallipoli peninsula, but worse, it had missed an opportunity. “Our Army has stood all the summer within a few miles of a decisive victory,” he claimed, one which could have given the Allies a significant strategic advantage. But herein lies one of the weaknesses of Churchill’s defence. His spirit and nature meant that he prized daring and unconventional action almost above anything else, and as a result he was prone to exaggerating its potential consequences. He could stand on his record of decisions in the run-up to the Dardanelles campaign and simultaneously castigate the Army leadership because he grotesquely overplayed the possible fruits of victory.

Starting with the staggeringly cold and detached observation that “it has been proved in this War that good troops, properly supported by Artillery, can make a direct advance of two or three miles in the face of any defence”, Churchill then told MPs that such an advance in the Dardanelles:

would have settled the fate of the Turkish Army on the promontory, would probably have decided the whole operations, might have determined the attitude of the Balkans, might have cut Germany from the East, and might have saved Serbia.

He had sold the idea of a campaign in the Dardanelles on even more than that. It had been discussed in the context of seizing and occupying Constantinople and knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war altogether. That this could all have been achieved by a force of obsolete battleships and the possibility, but no more than that, of an amphibious assault by infantry, should surely have seemed implausible.

One should not judge Churchill too harshly for having sought a way to break the deadlock on the Western Front, which even by 1915 was turning into a charnel house of unimaginable and unprecedented proportions. It was unthinkable that the war would simply be an attritional struggle in the north-east of France and Belgium, though that it more or less what it became. So high did that price seem that any alternative, no matter what the cost or likelihood of success, was to be considered, and a high cost in blood and treasure could be faced with equanimity since it was bound to be less than that on the Western Front. But when those considerations were blended with Churchill’s hugely overoptimistic assessment of what even a limited operation in the Dardanelles might accomplish, it became addictive, and politicians, admirals and generals were inevitably reluctant to challenge a potential war-winning strategy.

The Dardanelles campaign cost the Allied powers between 250,000 and 300,000 casualties, of whom as many as 61,000 were killed. The Ottomans suffered roughly th same number of casualties, but a slightly heavier toll of dead at 60-87,000; they also lost four ships. But the Allies lost seven battleships, eight submarines and a destroyer, and, critically, as Churchill could not with certainty predict, they evacuated the field of battle and left with no territorial gain. The war was not shortened meaningfully, and when Churchill spoke in November 1915, the worst horrors and losses of the First World War were still to come, beginning with the First Battle of the Somme on 1 July; on that day alone, 19,240 British soldiers were killed.

Churchill, by his own admission, consistently championed the campaign, and indeed pushed for greater vigour and commitment. He blamed others for the fact that it had not ended in success. But there is a very strong case that it could never have ended in success in the ambitious terms in which he had spoken: attacking such narrow beachheads on a long peninsula hundreds of miles from the Ottoman capital simply was not going to force the Sultan out of the war. Yet that exaggeration, that inflation of potential gain at a time when everyone was desperate to find a swift end to a war which was becoming bloodier and bloodier, inevitably had a chilling effect on critics and suppressed the necessity of revising the plan. It is impossible to discern much contrition or any sense of a lesson learned from Churchill’s resignation speech or his conduct otherwise, and even the Norway campaign of 1940, devised when he was once again First Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning of the Second World War, bore some of the hallmarks of Gallipoli. But the Norway campaign triggered Neville Chamberlain’s downfall, not Churchill’s, and in May 1940, at the age of 65, Winston Churchill finally became Prime Minister.

Jukebox jury: Dublin edition

1. “Raglan Road”, Luke Kelly

2. “Streams of Whiskey”, The Pogues

3. “Haunted”, Shane MacGowan and Sinéad O’Connor

4. “The Rocky Road to Dublin”, The High Kings

5. “The Parting Glass”, The Dubliners

Why should I talk to you?

… as playwright Wilson Mizner is supposed to have said to a priest as he lay on his deathbed. I’ve just been talking to your boss.