A N Wilson's Thatcher Love In.

JuanTwoThree · **Posted:** Sun Jan 18, 2009 11:16 am

My dad reckoned that Britain created a more efficient totalitarian state during the last war than the Germans did. There was more control of rationing, censorship, call up for men and women, internment, more control of movement and so on. But very sensibly the whole package, and the people who did it, were thanked very much and done away with when it might have been tempting to keep some of the temporary measures.

I'm not sure it's completely true: national service, which is traditionally disliked by the brits except in times of war, dragged on to the sixties.

Killer Whale · **Posted:** Sun Jan 18, 2009 11:55 am

Beast of Bolsover wrote:

Churchill was the right man for the war years in a national government . He was not a dictator , but then he was outside that a right wing imperialist empire loving twunt that wanted to gas the Kurds .Thank you for war leadership , fuck off for the rest. Even then , in military terms there is the question of Gallipoli .

Not forgetting wanting to shoot striking workers in South Wales. He's still remembered more for that in the valleys than for allegedly winning the war.

liberalelite · **Joined:** Sun Jan 11, 2009 5:32 pm **Posts:** 90

I was watching the World at War the other day and it was saying that Churchill's drive to collect people's domestic scrap metal (saucepans etc) was purely a psychological operation. The stuff had no military value, it wasn't melted down to make armaments of any kind. It was just something to make the whole of society feel they were doing something and being involved.

Fascinating.

Killer Whale · **Posted:** Sun Jan 18, 2009 10:47 pm

liberalelite wrote:

I was watching the World at War the other day and it was saying that Churchill's drive to collect people's domestic scrap metal (saucepans etc) was purely a psychological operation. The stuff had no military value, it wasn't melted down to make armaments of any kind. It was just something to make the whole of society feel they were doing something and being involved.

Fascinating.

My dad tells a story of how his entire town gathered in the town hall and was invited to buy war savings stamps and stick them on a bomb that would then be dropped on a German city. This was a double win for the government since not only were people lending it money by purchasing the stamps, but by instantly throwing them away they were guaranteeing that they would never seek to call in the loan.
After the war the 'bomb' was discovered hidden in a cellar. It wasn't really a bomb, of course, but a clever propaganda-cum-financial device.
And, let's not forget, tricks like this helped to defeat Nazism, so they were worth it, no question.

DisgustedOfTunbridgeWells · **Joined:** Fri Mar 24, 2006 5:00 pm **Posts:** 703

Lord Hankey -

Quote:

Churchill has great gifts of leadership, and can put his stuff over the people, Parliament, his Cabinet colleagues and even himself. But he is not what he thinks himself, a great master of the art of war. Up to now he has never brought off any great military enterprise. However defensible they may have been, Antwerp, Gallipoli and the expedition to help the White Russians at the end of the last war were all failures. He made some frightful errors of judgment between the two wars in military matters, e.g. obstructing the construction of new ships in 1925 ... his false estimates of the value of French generals & French military methods ... It was he who forced us into the Norwegian affair which failed; the Greek affair which failed; and the Cretan affair which is failing.

When Lloyd George made him war minister, Churchill asked him what the point was when there was no war, George replied if there were a war he most certainly wouldn't be minister of it.

The more I find about him, the more it becomes apparent he was the boris johnson of his day, he had a highly malicious side that boris probably hasn't got but in large part he bumbled around from fuck up to fuck up yet inexplicably remained.

A N Wilson's Thatcher Love In.

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