By any measure, the notion of a 1940 Allied attack against the neutral USSR would have been such a monumental blunder that it probably represented the single most embarrassing element of World War II, and a near-absolute blanket of silence quickly descended upon those facts, excluding them from virtually all subsequent Western histories. The first detailed coverage of that pivotal wartime turning point came in 2000 when historian Patrick Osborn published Operation Pike, an academic monograph based upon declassified government archives that appeared in a respected military history series.
Prior to that, I think the most extensive coverage in any Western book had been found in the 1955 wartime memoirs of prominent Anglo-French journalist Sisley Huddleston, which had causally mentioned the story in a couple of pages, whence I happened to discover it. The whole notion that the Allies had planned to attack the USSR in 1940 and that historical facts of such astonishing importance could have remained totally concealed for generations struck me as so implausible that I assumed the elderly Huddleston was merely delusional until I carefully investigated the issue and confirmed the reality of his remarkable claims.
Charmley only devoted about fifty words to this important topic, but I think that is fifty words more than the vast majority of other Western historians have allocated during the last eighty years, and his extremely brief mention convinced me of a couple of things. First, he was obviously aware of Operation Pike and its importance, but deliberately chose to completely downplay it, seeking to avoid academic controversy. And by absurdly stating that a massive Allied bombing offensive against the USSR “involved the risk of war with Russia” he seemed equally confident that virtually none of his readers were aware of the true facts, or would criticize such a ridiculous characterization of the situation.....
Irving’s 1987 book on Churchill had laid bare his subject’s extremely lavish lifestyle as well as his lack of any solid income, along with the terrible political consequences of that dangerous combination of factors. This shocking historical picture was fully confirmed in 2015 by a noted financial expert whose own book focused entirely on Churchill’s tangled finances, and did so with full cooperative access to his subject’s family archives. The story told by David Lough in No More Champagne was actually far more extreme than what had been described by Irving almost three decades earlier, with the author even suggesting that Churchill’s financial risk-taking was almost unprecedented for anyone in public or private life.
For example, at the very beginning of his book, Lough explained that Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, the same day that German forces began their invasion of the Low Countries and France. But aside from those terrible military and political challenges, Britain’s new wartime leader faced an entirely different crisis as well. He found himself unable to cover his personal bills, debt interest, or tax payments, all of which were due at the end of the month, thereby forcing him to desperately obtain a huge secret payment from the same Austrian Jewish businessman who had previously rescued him financially. Stories like this may reveal the hidden side of larger geopolitical developments, which sometimes only come to light many decades later.
