Photo: Sir Martin on the beach at Normandy, describing the invasion, May 2003. Photo © Bernie Pucker, with thanks to Liz Burgess. The Allied landing in 1944 might have ended in disaster. Winston Churchill thought he would be woken up to be told of massive casualties. General Eisenhower prepared a…
Photo: David Ben-Gurion declaring Israeli independence, with a photo of Theodor Herzl above him. Israel’s Declaration of Independence read out by David Ben Gurion, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948 The Jewish people came into being in Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel]. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was…
Photo: Venetia Stanley, 1887-1948 1971, Martin, just back in Oxford from a visit to Gallipoli to research Churchill’s time there for Volume III of the biography, writes: Shortly after my return to Britain, with the image of the Dardanelles still vivid in my mind I received a visitor. She was…
Photo: Churchill addressing the crew of the HMS Exeter Notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the Royal Air Force in repelling the German air assault throughout the summer and autumn of 1940, the British public, after the fierce battering of the Blitz, remained deeply anxious lest Hitler, having subjugated Denmark and…
Photo: Sir Ben Helfgott, knighted for Services to Holocaust Remembrance and Education Fifteen-year-old Ben Helfgott from Piotrkow, who had also been brought from Schlieben, later recalled: “Two weeks after reaching the camp I learned that my father had been killed only a few days before, trying to run away from…
PHOTO: Adolph Hitler salutes, while two SS men hold back an excited crowd. Circa 1932, Fox Photos Ltd August 1932: … as part of the research for his Marlborough biography, Churchill left England for Germany, and for a visit to the battlefields of Blenheim. With him on this expedition went…
Photo: The revamped Metropole Hotel, which had been requisitioned during both the First and Second World Wars as the Metropole Building, redone in 2007 as the Corinthia Hotel, Northumberland Avenue, London Note: While preparing a “Churchill-lite” tour of London for a former Hillsdale Churchill Fellow, Lillian Quinones, I found this…
I was born on 25 October 1936, three weeks after the Battle of Cable Street, and therefore have no recollections of it. I have prepared an account of it from contemporary documents, the newspapers of the time, and the recollections of some of those who took part in it for…
Photo: Jack Brauns, Martin, Avraham Tory, in Israel, 1980s (Jack Brauns, a survivor of Kovno, was the son of Dr Moshe Brauns, Director of the Jewish Hospital and Head of Infectious Diseases in the Ghetto) Like all the captive peoples – Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Dutch, Danes, and many more…
A vital part of the success of the RAF was played by Bomber Command. Sir Martin was involved in an attempt to see those who took part in Bomber Command awarded with a campaign medal, an honour that has still sadly eluded them. In 2008 he wrote this dedication: My…
On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions. As Big Ben struck 11, and the guns fell silent on the Western Front, he was looking out of his ministerial window over Northumberland Avenue. The broad street was deserted. Suddenly, as he wrote, he saw “the slight…
Photo: Winston Churchill with his son Randolph and daughter Mary at an American military cemetery near Namur, 15th July 1946, from Churchill, A Life. 6 June 1968 found Sir Martin on the beach in Portugal where he received word that his former boss Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston’s son, had died. Martin…
At five o’clock on the afternoon of 14 May 1948, in the main hall of the Tel Aviv Museum, a ceremony took place that inaugurated the State of Israel. The ceremony began with the singing of the Jewish anthem “Hatikvah”. A few moments later David Ben-Gurion, as Prime Minister and…
Photo: Theodor Herzl Just over 120 years ago, a Viennese Jewish journalist and visionary, Theodor Herzl, launched the modern Zionist movement at a meeting in Basle of Jews from all over the world. They called for a Jewish State in their ancestral land, Palestine, a land then ruled by the Turks.…
Photo: Winston Churchill and A.J.Balfour, 1920, photo courtesy of the late Sybil, Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley The keynote speaker at the Churchill Fellows Weekend will be His Excellency Ron Dermer, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States who will be delivering the Enid and R. Crosby Kemper Lecture on “Churchill…
Above Germany, British bombers, carrying out the Casablanca directive of Roosevelt and Churchill, attacked Berlin during the daylight hours of January 30 and Hamburg that same night. The raid on Berlin had been timed to coincide with radio broadcasts by both Goering and Goebbels declared: “A thousand years hence, every…
The film Darkest Hour depicts a scene in a London Tube Station. In Sir Martin’s piece Churchill in 1940, High Points and Low Points, he describes a similar “vote of confidence”: … on the afternoon of 26 May 1940, at a meeting of the War Cabinet in Churchill’s room in the House of Commons,…
Photo: Churchill addressing Congress , 26th December 1941 On December 5, however, Churchill learned from another Enigma decrypt that a German air corps had been ordered from Russia to the Mediterranean, to give Rommel the extra air support he had so strongly requested. Britain’s battle in the Western Desert had…
In the autumn of 1917, the British War Cabinet, desperate to persuade the Jews of Russia to urge their government to renew Russia’s flagging war effort, saw a future Jewish Palestine as an inducement and stimulus to the patriotic zeal of Russia’s Jews. To this end, Britain encouraged the possibility…
Photo caption: Gus Goldberger chanting a prayer in the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen, March 2009, photo taken from the upstairs women’s gallery. … growing Danish resistance to the German occupations slowly undermined any chance of continued co-operation, and on 28 August 1943 the Germans declared martial law. The SS hoped…