Winston Churchill was a true hero – it’s insane to call him a war criminal

ANOTHER day, another icy blast from the Left at the memory of one of our greatest ever Englishmen.

David Olusoga, the historian who presents the Civilisations series on the BBC, has become the latest high-profile figure to take aim at Winston Churchill.

In a speech at the Oxford Literary Festival he declared to an audience — some of whom were no doubt still high on the fumes of the last Churchill row at the Blighty Café in North London — that our wartime leader was actually involved in war crimes.

As he put it, the ex-PM was “responsible, or largely responsible, for the Bengal famine” of 1943 to ’44, adding that he “took part in things we would consider war crimes in Africa”.

We must all understand this, he went on, and anyone who wanted to highlight it should not be criticised.

He added: “Their voices are legitimate and their feelings mean something and they aren’t snowflakes and they aren’t trying to end history. They have a real case.”

Oh really?

The problem in both the cases Dr Olusoga cites — the Bengal famine and so-called “war crimes in Africa” — Churchill is in fact innocent of all the charges brought against him.

The facts simply do not stack up.

There are several things Churchill did get wrong in his 65 years in politics, as anyone would — great leadership inevitably involves many highs and lows.

It is part and parcel of running a country that occasionally you will be called upon to make very tough decisions indeed.

Churchill’s mistakes are plenty and well documented, including supporting the Dardanelles campaign in World War One, rejoining the gold standard in 1925 and misreading the abdication crisis.

But what he did in Africa and India were things that all Britons of all backgrounds should be PROUD of today, not ashamed.

When a cyclone hit Bengal in October 1942 it wiped out the rice crop.

In the past — and for decades into the future — the shortfall was made up from imports from Burma and the rest of the world.

Tragically in 1942 to ’44, the Japanese empire controlled Burma and would not allow rice exports to British-controlled India.

In April 1942 Japanese submarines in the Bay of Bengal were ready to sink any Allied vessel attempting to approach Bengal.

Help from other parts of India was ineffective.

The British Viceroys, Lord Linlithgow and then Lord Wavell, similarly failed to step in effectively, and the situation worsened.

Yet this was an internal affair.

None of it was Churchill’s fault. He was in London concentrating on trying to win World War Two — October 1942 was the month of the key, decisive battle of El Alamein.

He refused to allow grain ships from Canada and Australia to be sent to almost certain destruction in the Bay of Bengal until the Japanese submarine problem was dealt with.

As soon as it was, in mid-1944, he arranged for more than 150,000 tons of grain from Australia to be sent, and begged President Franklin D Roosevelt of the USA to send more, which he did not do (though no one accuses Roosevelt of being a war criminal).

Some respected historians have argued convincingly that the Bengal famine would have been worse if it hadn’t been for Churchill’s actions in procuring grain as soon as it was safe to ship.

But let’s not let these facts get in the way of this fashionable position of taking down Churchill.

So what of these “war crimes”?

Dr Olusoga did not specify which “war crimes” Churchill was supposed to be responsible for in Africa.

But in Churchill’s charge with the 21st Lancers at the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, escape from an Afrikaans prisoner of war camp in Pretoria, and helping with the relief of Ladysmith in the Boer War, all he did was show great courage, and indeed heroism.

And that might be where the problem lies.

Dr Olusoga criticises what he calls “this idea of heroes”.

Yet in history there are such things as heroes — people who act above the common herd, who achieve great things for their countries, who do things that are truly outstanding, and who deserve to be admired as a result.

To deny that — as Dr Olusoga seems to be doing — is to deny the existence of the most noble part of human nature.

Yet one sees again and again nowadays, especially on the political Left, a desire to drag down genuine heroes, such as Sir Winston Churchill.

The negatives must be hauled out, jammed in the spotlight, marched down the street to a chorus of “shame, shame, shame”.

No more heroes any more.

• Andrew Roberts’s biography, Churchill; Walking With Destiny, will be published in October by Penguin.