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…
Photo: Churchill at Chartwell, taken on 25 February 1939 and published in the New York Times magazine on 13 August 1939. “Somebody has to state the truth” One of Churchill’s main fears during the 1930s was that the British Government was not putting sufficient resources into anti-aircraft defence. … On…
Photo : Adam Czerniakow, Chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Council. 1942: On July 21 the Germans seized sixty Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, among them three members of the Jewish Council. At the same time, a number of Jews were shot in the streets, or in their homes. On…
Photo: Ben Helfgott and Sir Martin at an annual ’45 Aid Society dinner celebrating Liberation. More than half a century after liberation, Ben Helfgott reflected: “On the one hand we have recovered. On the other hand we have been damaged, a damage that is not outwardly visible. We have integrated…
The largest amphibious landing yet carried out in war took place on 6 June 1944, when American, British and Canadian troops fought their way ashore, as the first stage of the planned liberation of German-occupied western Europe. Of the 150,000 men who came in from the air by parachute and…
Photo: Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin, June 1967 In the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, a debate began inside Israel that was to continue for the next three decades: how to rule, and for how long to rule, the Palestinian Arabs. The Cabinet position was that for “full…
From the moment of Israel’s declaration of independence on 14 May 1948, Jerusalem – the capital city of the new nation – was besieged, as Arab forces, determined to crush the Jewish state at birth, cut off its main city from the remainder of the country. The only link between…
On 8 May 1945 the war in Europe came to an end. Six million Jews had been murdered; hundreds of thousands of pitiful survivors craved to be allowed to go at once to Palestine, and to rebuild their shattered lives in the Jewish National Home – a refuge which had…
“This book is dedicated to the 13 million Jews and the 1,300 million Muslims in the world in the hope that they may renew in the Twenty-First Century the mutual tolerance, respect and partnership that marked many periods in their history” The conquests of Islam made Jews subjects of Arab…
… in a fifteen minute broadcast to the United States on 8 August 1939, a broadcast spiced with irony, Churchill began: “Holiday time, ladies and gentlemen! Holiday time, my friends across the Atlantic! Holiday time, when the summer calls the toilers of all countries for an all too brief spell…
Many of those Jews who survived Nazi rule and occupation in Europe between 1939 and 1945 owed their survival to non-Jews. The penalty for helping a Jew hide was often death, especially in Poland and eastern Europe. Many hundreds of non-Jews were executed for trying to help Jews. Hostile neighbours…
It was a cold, grey March day in 2009 when Martin and I were at the Wannsee Villa near Berlin. We were with the filmmaker Michael King and his crew to film Martin at the villa where the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” had been discussed and finalised, on…
Throughout his long life, Winston Churchill understood the power of words. In public speeches, in published books, in newspaper and magazine articles, he expressed his feelings and laid out his vision for the future. His descriptions of the wars that he fought in between 1897 and 1900 were read with…
In the summer of 1944, shortly after Allied troops liberated Rome, Churchill was asked to set out for the Italian people the ideas that should guide them now that Italian Fascism had been overthrown – the harsh totalitarian rule of Mussolini and his Fascist Party. Churchill’s message reflects his abiding…
In 1962 Sir Martin spent the summer driving through the United States, returning in 1965 as a visiting scholar at the University of South Carolina. It was during these early visits that he developed a love for American history and geography in all their aspects. His Routledge Atlas of American History…
In 2006, Martin, who had been appointed a Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College in Michigan, was there speaking on “What Did Democracy Mean to Winston Churchill”. After his lecture, I made my way up to him. The moment he spotted me, he called out to me and turned to a gentleman standing next…
Journal of the British Politics Society, Norway British Politics Review,Volume 4, No. 4, Autumn 2009 ©Martin Gilbert I have made a close study during my Churchill work of the low points and high points of his war leadership. In this article, I have chosen seven, between May and December 1940.…
©Martin Gilbert, 2009 First Published in The Observer There can have been few more skilful cover-ups in British history than the story of the British Government’s efforts to force the Poles to give up territory to Germany on the very eve of the Second World War. When Neville Chamberlain, who…