"Churchill on Lee's victory at Gettysburg" Topic

This fascinating artiles was referenced on the Society of Daisy yahoo group.

It is a very thoughful article on historical what-if's written by Churchill.

link

Dave

Churchill at his worst, what a bunch of horse droppings.

It illustrates why Churchill was the right man for the right job in 1939. And, why he was voted out immediately after the war was over.
His time, and prejudices, had passed.

No Lloyd, that was the GK Chesterton essay in the same series. There's a single volume with the lot of them titled If It Had Happened Otherwise. That generation of alternate world stories--and you can see it in Bring the Jubilee, too--was prone to just inverting their own present rather than imagining a truly different one.

But the Chesterton was the worst Chesterton I know. Don John of Austria would rescue Mary Queen of Scots and not behave like any historical 16th Century Catholic monarchs because--well, they just wouldn't, that's all!

People want their chosen alternate history to be the earthly paradise. What you'd actually get is a different array of problems.

Dave, thank you so much for posting that link. Churchill's mischievous sense of humour sparkles through every word. A priceless piece of prose from a man possessed of supreme imagination!

Interesting what if.

Rather more optimistic than Turtledove.

Also glosses over Westward expansion by the South postwar other than the conquest of Mexico – lots of room for friction if the South pushed there in the flush of victory. Would Texas have accepted the defeat at Glorieta as final?

+1 Pan Marek

I remember reading this somewhere decades ago. Churchill wrote this sort of thing for the money. He might have been the grandson of a duke, but he wasn't independently wealthy and he had expensive habits. If you want to read something that he cared about, try his biography of Marlborough.

Andy, quite true. Churchill, for much of his life, supported himself with his writing. He was terrible with finances (both personal and at the governmental level) and was often in financial straights and had to be bailed out by generous friends. Only his writing kept him afloat.

It illustrates why Churchill was the right man for the right job in 1939. And, why he was voted out immediately after the war was over.
His time, and prejudices, had passed.

Actually, Churchill could have and was advised by the Conservatives to not hold elections until after the Japanese were defeated. His party wanted six months to put together some programs to answer the Labor Party's post-war issues. Churchill's government had been on a war footing for a long time and changing course would require time.

Point being: Churchill chose to have elections immediately when he didn't have to, because "England was a democracy." I don't know if he had waited six months whether he would have been voted out anyway… Or that he just wanted not to be PM anymore. He was very hawkish towards Russia and some were afraid he would start a war with the Soviets, but it was his decision to hold the elections.

All true…

But Winston (C) WAS a Force of nature and an Historical Giant!!!

(His Mom like I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY)

If the Confederates were going to win the war on the battlefield, it was more likely to happen at Chickamauga than at Gettysburg.

A good book to read is "Clad in Iron" by Howard J. Fuller. Britain was very worried about US naval power. The Us had proven Iron Clad ships Britain did not. There was a great debate on how to deal with Us Naval Power. In fact the British ere afraid that both French and Us Iron clad ships could defeat the British navy.