BOOK: CHURCHILL'S WAR WAS A WASTE

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993                   TAG: 9301050052
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO   
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LONDON                                LENGTH: Medium
BOOK: CHURCHILL'S WAR WAS A WASTE
Winston Churchill could have saved tens of thousands of lives and Britain's empire by accepting Hitler's offers of peace, according to a new book that is being fiercely debated by historians.
The revisionist biography, "Churchill: The End of Glory," by John Charmley, argues that the wartime leader should have saved all the "blood, toil, tears and sweat" he offered Britain in 1940.
"Hitler would have invaded Russia and the world's two nastiest dictators would have faced each other like two great overweight heavyweight boxers," Charmley said Monday in a telephone interview from Fulton, Mo.
"The `victor' would have been either Russia or Germany and they would have been so shattered by the effort that they would not have been in a position to threaten anyone."
Charmley, an English history lecturer at the University of East Anglia, is on leave at Westminster College in Fulton, where Churchill made his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in 1946.
"I'm probably the first historian to come to Churchill without the baggage of memories," said Charmley, 37, who book was published this week by John Curtis/Hodder & Stoughton.
Alan Clark, a former defense minister and Conservative Party lawmaker, called Charmley's book "probably the most important revisionist text to be published since the war."
"There were several occasions when a rational leader could have got, first reasonable, then excellent, terms from Germany. Hitler actually offered peace in July 1940 before the Battle of Britain started," Clark wrote in The Times of London on Saturday.
"We could have made peace and . . . that would have saved an awful lot of bloodshed and an awful lot of riches and kept us very much stronger into the '40s and '50s," Clark told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
But established historians of the period have bristled at Charmley's biography, which argues that peace could have been had on several occasions in 1940 and 1941.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB