History: August 2007 Archives

"Britain, in short, surrendered her own empire to defeat a chimera conjured up by Winston Churchill, a putative danger from Nazi Germany -- a threat which never existed except when Churchill needed to call upon it."

Churchill's War: Triumph in Adversity (Vol. II), by David Irving. London: Focal Point, 2001. Hardcover. 1060 pages. Photographs. Appendices. Source references. Index.

It has been fourteen years since the publication of the first volume of David Irving's three-part biography of Britain's legendary wartime leader. This second volume, subtitled "Triumph in Adversity," traces Winston Churchill's career from June 1941 through July 1943, the pivotal period when, after calamitous setbacks, the tide of the war turned decisively in favor of the Allies.

With this handsome, meticulously referenced and generously illustrated work (including many color photographs), Britain's best-known and most controversial historian once again displays his extraordinary knack for extracting information from overlooked diaries and suppressed records, and his gift for turning mountains of data into well-crafted prose. This measured, masterful examination of Britain's towering twentieth-century premier is Irving at his best.

Winston Churchill considered blocking all immigration to Britain because he feared a growing "coloured population" was posing a threat to Britain's social stability.

Churchill, then 79, told Cabinet colleagues that he did not "want a parti-coloured UK". At a Cabinet meeting on February 3, 1954, the prime minister told colleagues: "Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here. Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in UK?"

Churchill said immigrants were attracted to Britain by the welfare state and he said: "Public opinion in UK won't tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits."

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Early human-like residents of Europe may have arrived out of Asia, rather than just Africa.

An international team of researchers reports in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Asians appear to have played a larger part in the settlement of Europe than did Africans.

The team led by Maria Martinon-Torres of the National Center for the Investigation of Human Evolution, in Burgos, Spain, reached that conclusion after analyzing more than 5,000 fossil teeth from early hominins, an early form of human predecessors.