Questioning History. Would you like to take part?

Although we have stopped our World War 1 blogs for the time-being, Jim and I frequently liaise with other researchers, to which end Jim will be visiting Canada shortly. I have been giving a number of talks since these blogs began, having been invited to speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, at conferences in Brussels and Dublin, for several groups in London and on a World War 1 battlefields trip through France and Belgium.

I have been invited to speak at an exciting conference in December, details of which can be found below. The conference is entitled Questioning History and I have been asked to talk on two subjects, namely The Coup of 1916 (which bears remarkable similarities to what is happening to us today) and The True history of a great British Patriot, Edith Cavell.

The whole project which is led by Professor Gloria Moss from the University of Hertford looks really varied and interesting.

She has produced a short promotional video for the weekend of 14/15 December – see https://youtu.be/HR7FGLcybU8.  It would be great to see and meet others who share our interest in why history is regularly hidden. The event comprises:

•  Pre-Christmas weekend on  ‘Questioning History’
•  Date:  14-15 December
•  30/40 mins from London
•  Early Bird tickets throughout August and first two weeks of September
•  Website https://awakeandawareholid.wixsite.com/website
•  Email: all inquiries to awakeandawareholidays@gmail.com
•  Books and videos by speakers available for sale (and signed making excellent gifts)

Thanks again for all of your support over the years.

Gerry Docherty

Fake History 3: From Burning Correspondence To Permanently Removing The Evidence

From its conception in 1891, members of the secret society have taken exceptional care to remove all traces of the conspiracy. Letters to and from its leader Alfred Milner were culled, removed, burned or otherwise destroyed. [1] In 2013 we closely examined many of Milner’s remaining papers which are held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. They bear witness to the zeal with which much evidence of wrongdoing has been obliterated. Secret dispatches that we know from other sources that he sent, have disappeared. Incriminating letters penned by King Edward VII – a leading player in the secret cabal before his death in 1910 – were subject to an order that they must be destroyed immediately on his death. Admiral Jacky Fisher a Royal favourite, noted in his Memories that he had been advised by Lord Knollys, the king’s private secretary, to burn all letters sent to him by the king. Fisher consequently burned much of his royal correspondence but couldn’t bear to part with it all. [2] Lord Nathaniel Rothschild likewise ordered that his papers and correspondence be burned posthumously lest his political influence and connections became known. As his official biographer commented, one can but ‘wonder how much of the Rothschilds political role remains irrevocably hidden from posterity’. [3]

In Britain crucial primary documents about the lies and deceit surrounding the First World War through diaries, memoirs and important letters were censored and altered, evidence sifted, removed, burned, carefully ‘selected’ and falsified. Bad as that may be, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the outrageous theft of crucial papers from across Europe. In the immediate post-war years, hundreds of thousands of important documents pertaining to the origins of the First World War were taken from their countries of origin to the west coast of America and concealed in locked vaults at Stanford University. The documents, which would doubtless have exposed the men really responsible for the war and their transgressions, had to be removed to a secure location and hidden from prying eyes. It was the greatest heist of history that the world has ever known.

Herbert Clark Hoover, a corrupt and bullying ‘mining engineer’ reinvented as a munificent humanitarian and international relief organiser, was the Secret Elite agent charged with the mammoth job of stealing the European documents. In modern day parlance had it all been recorded on computer, he was the one who pressed the delete button. He had earlier been tasked with ensuring that Germany had sufficient supplies of food, without which the war would have been over by 1915. Far from just being the man who saved the Belgian people from starvation during the war, his so-called ‘Belgian Relief’ agency also fed the German army in order to prolong the conflict and maximise profit for the banking and armaments manufacturing elites on both sides of the Atlantic. [4] Hoover’s American-based organisation raised millions of dollars through loans and public donation, shipped vast quantities of food and necessities to war-torn Europe and made obscene profits for his backers, yet no documentary evidence of this enormous enterprise could be found at the end of the war. It had disappeared. All of it. Impossible, surely?

The theft of Europe’s historical documents was dressed in a cloak of respectability and represented as a philanthropic act of preservation. These documents, it was claimed, would be properly archived for the use of future historians. The official line was that if not removed from government agencies in France, Russia, Germany and elsewhere, the papers detailing the extent of Hoover’s work would ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. [5] It was no chance decision that only documents relating to the war’s origins and ‘Belgian relief’ were taken. No official British, French or American government approval was sought or given. Indeed, like the thief in the night, stealth was the rule of thumb. On the basis that it was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University and a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate the great heist and give it academic credence.

In 1919, Hoover recruited a management team of ‘young scholars’ from the American army and secured their release from military service. They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s true origins and the sham Commission for Relief of Belgium. Other documents concerning the conduct of the war itself were ignored. His team used letters of introduction and logistical support to collect import / export bills, sales and distribution records, insurance documents and local customs permits amongst a plethora of incriminating evidence.

He established a network of representatives throughout Europe and persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. [6] He sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, they visited nations on the brink of starvation and faced little resistance in their quest. They made the right local contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [7] Hoover recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ from European governments. [8] It has not been possible for us to discover who actually funded this gargantuan, massively expensive venture.

The removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem and with the Bolsheviks in control, access to Russian documents from the Czarist regime proved straightforward. They undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 had been orchestrated through Petrograd, and how Russia’s general mobilisation on Germany’s eastern border had been the real reason for the war starting. It might appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove twenty-five carloads of material from Petrograd. [9] However, when one realises that the international bankers in the secret society had financed and facilitated Lenin and Trotsky’s return to Russia, and the Bolshevik Revolution itself, it becomes clear. [10] The Americans could have what they wanted. This surprising event was reported in the New York Times which claimed that Hoover’s team bought the documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash. [11] And some people think that fake news is a twenty-first century concept.

Removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’ – a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained this away with the comment that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’. [12]

But the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s men also acquired 6,000 volumes of German court documents covering the complete official proceedings of the Kaiser’s pre-war activities and his wartime conduct of the German empire. [13] If Germany had been guilty of planning and starting the war – as decreed by Court Historians ever since – these documents would have proved it. Strange that none have ever been released. Had there been incriminating documents, it is certain that copies would have been sent out immediately to every press and news agency throughout the world proving Germany was to blame. The removal and concealment of the German archives by the Secret Elite was crucial because they would have proved the opposite: Germany had not started the war.

By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ at Stanford University was so packed with archived material that it was legitimately described as the world’s largest collection of First World War documentation. [14] In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authority had keys to the padlocked gates. It was the Fort Knox of historical evidence, a closely guarded establishment for items too sensitive to share. In 1941 carefully selected archives were made available to genuine researchers. Over the previous two decades the unaccountable ruling cabal – the very men responsible for WW1 – had unfettered control over them.

What they withheld from view, shredded, or put in the Stanford furnace will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed, it is a startling fact that no war historian has ever written about this utterly astonishing theft of the European war documents and their shipment to America.

‘To the victor go the spoils and history is part of that booty’, but it is our history. We should be demanding to know what is hidden from us. The First World War was the seminal event of the twentieth century, and all that followed, including WW2, came as a direct consequence. The people of Britain and Germany, indeed the world, have a right to know the full extent of what has been secretly retained, hidden, or posted ‘missing’ regarding responsibility for that war.

1. A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 551, footnote.
2. Lord Fisher, Memories and Records, vol. 1, p. 21.
3. Niall Ferguson, House of Rothschild, vol. II, p. 319.
4. Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p. 201 et seq.
5. Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041
6. Charles G. Palm and Dale Reed, Guide to the Hoover Institution Archives, p. 5.
7. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
8. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
9. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library at http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
10. Macgregor and Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p 453 et seq.
11. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
12. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library at http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
13. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
14. Hoover Institution, Stanford University at http://www.hoover.org/about/herbert-hoover

Fake History 2 : The Rise Of The Money Power Control

Carrol Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope revealed the ambitions of those whose wealth bought real power:

… The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.’ [1]

Free from any single political interference, this system was controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Quigley was adamant that ‘Each central bank … sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.’ The power of the central bank in each instance rested largely on its control of the credit and money supply. In the world as a whole the power of the central bankers rested very largely on their control of loans and of gold flows.

Professor Quigley explained how, in 1924, Reginald McKenna, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer and at the time chairman of the board of the Midland Bank, told its stockholders: “I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money … And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people.” [2]

It was an extraordinarily frank statement from a man close to the inner circles of the British Establishment. The international bankers on Wall Street were intimately linked to the Rothschilds in London and Paris. They manipulated the political power of the state to create and corrupt the Federal Reserve System to gain a monopoly over the money issue through it.

Another important contributor to the unmasking of the money power, Professor Antony Sutton revealed that ‘The Federal Reserve has the power to create money. This money is fiction, created out of nothing … In brief, this private group of bankers has a money machine monopoly. This monopoly is uncontrolled by anyone and is guaranteed profit.’ [3]

With a magic machine that created money from thin air, the international bankers were able to control not merely individual politicians, but entire governments. By comparison, controlling the writing and teaching of history was child’s play. Quigley deliberately revealed the names of the rich and powerful banks and bankers – the Gods of Money – who were intimately involved. They included N.M Rothschild, Barings, Hambros, Lazard Brothers and Morgan Grenfell in London. [4] On Wall Street were J.P. Morgan, Kuhn-Loeb & Co., J.D. Rockefeller and Brown Brothers and Harriman. [5] Members of these banks on both sides of the Atlantic ‘knew each other intimately.’ [6]

Carroll Quigley had been invited by the secret society to study its membership, aims and objectives, and states he was helped in this by the British historian Alfred Zimmern who was himself a member of the secret cabal. It appears that Professor Quigley was actually chosen by the secret society to be its official historian. [7] He was one of the brightest stars in the galaxy of American academics. As a student at Harvard, Quigley had gained two top degrees and a Ph.D. He taught history at Princeton University and Harvard before moving to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown as professor of history. He was a distinguished member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Anthropological Association and the American Economic Association for many years. He was also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defence, the U.S. Navy and the Smithsonian Institution. He sat on the Congressional Select Committee which set up the National Space Agency. This is an outstanding professional record. Most men or women of ambition would have considered their careers to be crowned by any one of Quigley’s individual achievements. He had entry to the innermost workings of the powers which controlled the United States. It is vital that we appreciate that his voice comes form the inside looking out. He knew what was happening and how the system truly worked.

Yet his personal position on these developments remains somewhat confused. Quigley stated that he admired the society and many of its members and its goals, but not its methods. [8] He believed they should abandon secrecy and make their aims and objectives clear to all. This may have been his downfall. To us it remains an enigma that Quigley said he admired these individuals and their globalist aims of a one world government controlled by bankers, yet on the very same page stated that their tendency to place power in and influence into hands chosen by friendship rather than merit, their oblivion to the consequences of their actions, their ignorance of the point of view of persons in other countries or of persons of other classes in their own country … have brought many of the things which they and I hold dear, close to disaster.’ [9]

Did Professor Quigley decide in the end, like his fellow historian Professor Alfred Zimmern, that the secret society posed such a menace to the world that he chose to expose it? We shall never know. Unable to ridicule Tragedy and Hope as ‘conspiracy theory’ because of his exalted academic position and status, those he named decided to bury the book. Immediately on its release, unknown persons removed it from bookstore shelves in America – ‘faster than exploding Easter bunnies’ as one wit put it. It was withdrawn from sale without any justification and its original plates were destroyed by Quigley’s publisher, the Macmillan Company. The publishing company was owned by the family of the Earl of Stockton, Harold McMillan, who was British Prime Minister 1957-1963 and at the heart of the British Establishment. Years later, when a rare surviving copy of Tragedy and Hope was found and an unknown publisher decided to pirate it, copies began to sell.

Quigley was deeply offended by the suppression of a book which had taken him twenty years to write. In a 1974 radio broadcast he warned the interviewer, Rudy Maxa of the Washington Post: ‘You better be discreet. You have to protect my future, as well as your own.’ [10] He revealed in the interview that after the book was suppressed, for the next six years he repeatedly asked the publisher what was going on. They ‘lied, lied, lied’ to him and deliberately misled him into believing that it would be reprinted. Quigley stated that powerful people had suppressed his book because it exposed matters that they did not want known. Universities, academics and the mainstream media remained silent over his explosive revelations, the destruction of the book, and the disgraceful treatment of one of America’s top academics.

Unbeknown to them, Quigley had written an earlier history (in 1949) of the all-powerful secret society titled The Anglo-American Establishment. Though some of the facts came to him from sources which he was not permitted to name, he presented only those where he was ‘able to produce documentary evidence available to everyone’. [11] The book carried far greater detail of the secret society than Tragedy and Hope, especially on the English side of the Atlantic. It exposed exactly who its members were and their intricate family, banking and business inter-connections. It revealed how they controlled politics, the major newspapers, and the writing and teaching of history through Oxford University. It was clearly such an explosive expose of the ruling cabal, and placed him in such potential danger, that he would not allow it to be published in his lifetime. The book was only released in 1981, four years after his death. We consider The Anglo-American Establishment to be the most important work of modern history written in the twentieth century.

The relevance of Quigley’s work in the context of fake history derives from the fact that he revealed exactly how the secret society controlled its writing and teaching through a ‘triple-front penetration in politics, education, and journalism.’ [12] They did so through their domination of Oxford University, and Balliol College and All Souls College in particular. They recruited men of ability, chiefly from All Souls and controlled them through the granting of titles and positions of power. They were thus able to influence public policy and education by placing these individuals at the apex of public institutions such as universities, shielding them as much as possible from public attention criticism. [13] Viscount (Lord) Alfred Milner was the leading player in the society’s growth and development from the late 1890s until his death in 1925. He gathered around him a brood of talented Oxford men, utterly loyal to the primacy of the British Empire in pursuit of a new world order. Quigley wrote that no country that values its safety should allow what the Milner group accomplished; ‘that is, that a small number of men would be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolise so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period. [14]

‘Almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions’ is, in a nut-shell, how they control history, turn history from enlightenment to deception. The Secret Elite dictated the writing of history from the ivory towers of academia at Oxford, and what was taught thereafter in universities, colleges and schools across the land. To this day, researchers are denied access to documents because the Secret Elite has much to fear from the truth. They ensure that we learn only those ‘facts’ that support their version of history. They are determined to wipe out all traces that lead back to them, and take every possible step to ensure that it remains exceedingly difficult to unmask their crimes.

They carefully controlled the publication of official government papers, the selection of documents for inclusion in the official version of the history of the First World War and all that followed. Incriminating documents were burned, removed from official records, shredded, falsified or deliberately rewritten, so that what remained for genuine researchers and historians was carefully selected material. The professors of history who wrote the false history of the First World War had been carefully selected in the pre-war years by the ruling elite and placed in chairs of modern history and the history of war at Oxford. These chairs had been set up and fully funded by members of the secret society whose outrageous wealth was based on their gold and diamond investments in South Africa. Few, if any, historians elsewhere dared question these “eminent” men at the “world’s leading university.” This fake history has been ingrained in the minds of generations of British schoolchildren over the past century. Any alternative view is heresy.

Unable to ridicule the Anglo-American Establishment as conspiracy theory due to the late Professor Quigley’s high status, and clearly concerned that any publicity would simply draw attention to it, the ruling elite decided to bury it. Anyone ignorant of how tightly controlled the mainstream media is might expect quality newspapers to headline this explosive work and praise Quigley as a hero for exposing the destruction of the democratic process. He had uncovered and revealed a deep and very dangerous corruption which posed a grave threat to our way of life. What happened? Nothing. No newspaper or television station reviewed or commented on his incendiary book. None. It was blanked by ‘official’ history. To our knowledge and to their shame, no mainstream academic historian has ever written a review of this stunning work. What we must ask is; was anyone permitted to offer such a critique?

1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time, p. 324.
2. Ibid., p. 325.
3. Antony C. Sutton, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, p. 2.
4. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 500.
5. Ibid., pp. 529-531.
6. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. ix.
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynVqPnMQ2sI
8. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. xi.
9. Ibid.
10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeuF8rYgJPk
11. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. x.
12. Ibid., p.15.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p.197.

War Without End 9: Clearing Up Before Clearing Out

One final task was required before these elites could safely move forward. They had to ensure that all the evidence of their complicity in deliberately starting the war in 1914 and prolonging it beyond 1915, was removed. The consequences had been horrendous but the blame had to be diverted elsewhere. The truth had to be buried. This task fell to Herbert Hoover, a trusted placement, who also had a proprietary interest in hiding his own fraudulent involvement in the Commission for Relief in Belgium. (see blogs on Belgian Relief) On the basis that his involvement was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate a great heist of documentary evidence pertaining to the war and its true origins, from countries across Europe and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability.

Had Adams been genuine, or cared about protecting the original sources so precious to academic historians, he would have had no need for confidentiality. Indeed at the start of his secret mission he appeared to recognise that he had been given a wonderful opportunity to capture a unique experience for future researchers. Adams resolved to keep a diary, detailing the names of those whom he met and what they brought with them, but stopped after a week on the spurious excuse that he was making too many contacts and the work was too interesting ‘to suffer interruption by recording them.’ [1] The task had to be undertaken immediately. Speed was of the essence. Adams was in Paris by 11 June with no plan of action, other than follow Hoover’s instructions that all the stolen or illegally procured documentation was sent to Stanford University in California. It was about as distant a destination from the European theatre as could be imagined.

Nothing was too unimportant. Decisions about relevance were left to a later date. Two years later Adams still hadn’t even begun the process of creating a catalogue of the treasures he had syphoned off, on the rather spurious basis that doing so too early led to ‘disappointment and vexation’. [2] In Belgium, for example, access to government records was facilitated by ‘M. Emile Francqui, mining engineer and a banker of world reputation’. [3] Of course it was. Who else knew where all of the skeletons from the Belgian Relief scandal were buried? Francqui, whose all-powerful Belgian bank, the Societe Generale, ended the war cash rich and thriving beyond its dreams, [4] was the one man who knew exactly what evidence had to be removed immediately. Why have historians and investigative journalists failed to unmask this charade? Hoover and Francqui orchestrated the removal of documents that enabled the myth of Belgian Relief to flourish while masking its sinister role.

Hoover had many powerful friends. He persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his ‘humanitarian’ relief agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest.  They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium.

They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’. [5] He recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. [6] Hoover  donated a $50,000 ‘gift’ for the task. That would only have paid for around seventy of these agents for a year. It has not proved possible for us to discover from what source the remaining nine-hundred men were paid.

Hoover’s backers claimed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’. According to Ephraim Adams, Hoover himself estimated that the process of ‘collecting’ would go on for twenty-five years [7] but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue the material. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace’. [8] How convenient. The official propaganda insisted that the work was urgent, but it would take a millennium to catalogue. The secret removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem for the Secret Elite, and, once the Bolsheviks had taken control, access to Russian documents proved straightforward. Professor Miliukov, foreign minister in the old Kerensky regime, informed Hoover that some of the czarist archives from the origins of the war had been concealed in a barn in Finland. Hoover later boasted that ‘Getting them was no trouble at all. We were feeding Finland at the time.’ [9]

The Secret Elite thus took possession of a mass of evidence from the old czarist regime that undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on Sarajevo and Russia’s secret mobilisation. Likewise, damning correspondence between the Russian foreign ministry and its representatives in Paris and Belgrade has been ‘lost’ to posterity. All Russian diplomatic papers from 1914 were removed from their archives by an unknown person. These were documents of momentous importance that would have proved that Germany had not caused the First World War.

It might at first appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove 25 carloads of material from Petrograd. [10] According to the New York Times, Hoover’s team bought the Bolshevik documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash, [11] but there were darker forces at play. As we have previously documented, the Bolshevik leaders were beholden to American bankers closely linked to the Secret Elite and were in the process of selling off the best of Russian resources to them.

The removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’, a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’, [12] but the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s people also acquired 6,000 volumes of court documents covering the complete official and secret proceedings of the Kaiser’s preparations for war should France and Russia mobilise against her. Where then is the vital evidence to prove Germany’s guilt? Had there been proof it would have been released immediately. There was none.

By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ was so packed with documentary material that it was legitimately described as the largest in the world dealing with the First World War. [13] In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authorisation and a key to the padlock were allowed access. In 1941, 22 years after Hoover began the task of secreting away the real history of the First World War, selected documents were made available to the public. What was withheld from view or destroyed will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed, it is a startling fact that few if any war historians have ever written about this illicit theft of European documents relating to arguably the most crucially important event in European and world history, and their concealment in California. Why? They were stealing history to protect themselves.

In a sense this whole protracted world war, justified by lies, prolonged by profiteers and politicians with hidden agendas, subjected to false histories, suffered by nations in debt and by ordinary people through irreparable loss, did not end. All of the consequences of war were sucked into the vortex of a grossly unfair peace. Furthermore, the ‘hidden powers’, the ‘money-power’, ‘the power behind the curtain’ who had ordained the war were more secure in their control of the developed world by the end of 1919. Versailles did not mark the end. It provided a forum for the new elite to regroup and draw breath. Worse was to come.

1. Ephraim Adams, The Hoover War Collection at Stanford University, California; a report and an analysis, (1921), p. 7. https://archive.org/details/cu31924031034360.
2. Ibid.
3. Adams, The Hoover War Collection , (1921), p. 36.
4. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/generale-bank-générale-de-banque-history/
5. Whittaker Chambers, Hoover Library http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/%5D
6. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
7. Adams, The Hoover War Collection, p. 5.
8. Cissie Dore Hill, Collecting the Twentieth Century, p. 1 at http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/8041.
9. Chambers, Hoover Library at http://whittakerchambers.org/articles/time-a/hoover-library/
10. Ibid.
11. New York Times, 5 February 1921.
12. Chambers, Hoover Library, as above.
13. New York Times, 5 February 1921.

The Rape Of Russia 4: The Rise of Dictatorship

The ‘Provisional Government’ in Petrograd lurched from one crisis to another. With continuing heavy military defeats and ever-rising death toll, Russian troops and civilians called for an end to the madness.  An All-Russian Peasant Congress, dominated by the socialist revolutionaries, was held in May in support of the provisional Government. A conference of Petrograd factory workers on the other hand, became the first representative body to support the Bolsheviks. It was a time of new beginnings and old grudges. The first All-Russian Congress of Soviets was held in June, with 822 vote-carrying delegates. 285 were Socialist Revolutionary Party, 248 Mensheviks and 105 Bolsheviks. The remaining 184 delegates belonged to various minority groups or had no party allegiance. Throughout the three week conference, Trotsky solidly supported the Bolsheviks. Congress, however, passed a vote of confidence in the Government, and rejected a Bolshevik resolution demanding ‘the transfer of all state power into the hands of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies’. [1] Hamstrung and without any decisive power, the Provisional Government was open to attack from right and left. Lenin sensed a definitive opportunity.

Four days of menacing street demonstrations that began on 3 July in Petrograd were widely believed to have been instigated by Lenin in an attempt to seize power. Troubles mounted.  Prince Lvov resigned as premier and the Menshevik, Alexander Kerensky, took charge, promising the allies that Russia would remain committed to the war. Kerensky was scathing of Bolshevism and vice versa. He dubbed it ‘the socialism of poverty and hunger’, insisting that there could be no socialism without democracy. [2]

Trotsky, who had once sided with Kerensky, disagreed. He and around 4,000 fellow members of the Mezhrayonka, a faction holding an intermediate position between the ‘soft’ Mensheviks and the ‘hard’ Bolsheviks, sided with Lenin. Trotsky then chose to support the man he had previously attacked as a ‘despot’; a man whose political philosophy, he had claimed, ‘was based on lies and falsification’. It was Trotsky himself who foresaw that Lenin’s success would ‘lead to a dictatorship over the proletariat’ rather than ‘a victory of the proletariat’. And so it came to pass that Trotsky enabled his own prophecy. He was elected onto the Bolshevik central committee, polling a mere three votes less than Lenin himself. Strengthened by their political alliance, Lenin urged his Bolsheviks ‘to prepare for armed uprising’. Russia, he declared, was in the hands of a ‘dictatorship’. [3] The irony of his words remains awesome.

In August 1917, an attack on the Austrian army in Galicia failed to achieve any break through and the Provisional Government’s eight-month period provided no major reforms. Indeed it only served to ensure the systematic disintegration of the Russian army. [4] General Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the provisional government’s own forces, ordered his troops to march against it, but the military coup failed thanks to the Bolshevik influence on the troops. Kerensky’s standing was undermined while Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik stock rose in popularity, winning majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. By early October preparations were approved for an armed insurrection. Local garrisons ‘were bribed to remain neutral’ and the Petrograd Soviet created a military-revolutionary committee under Trotsky. Bolshevik military preparations gathered pace. What had been a fringe party in May was on the point of seizing power by October. [5]

In the early hours of 25 October 1917, (7 November, in the Gregorian calendar), armed Bolshevik forces occupied key-points in Petrograd, including the main telephone exchange, post office, train stations and power stations. At 2 am they calmly walked into the Winter Palace, the seat of government, proclaimed victory and declared a ‘People’s Republic’. Bolshevik propaganda films produced later depicted their men fighting their way bravely through the city streets and ‘storming’ the Winter Palace. It was all lies. Very few shots were fired all night. Prime Minister Kerensky fled, and within two days all provisional government ministers had been arrested. [6]

On 26 October 1917, Lenin signed a ‘Decree of Peace’ which proposed the immediate withdrawal of Russia from the World War. Agreement with Germany and the Central Powers on a ceasefire on the Eastern Front was reached on 21 November, and an armistice was signed between them on 4 December. On several occasions sporadic fighting flared up, but Russia was set to sign a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. Peace at home, however, was an illusion. The American correspondent Eugene Lyons [7] later summarised the consequences of the Bolshevik seizure of power: ‘Within a few months, most of the czarist practices the Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecutions of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crimes than in any other modern nation, the suppression of all other parties’. [8]

Lenin dissolved the elected parliament and legislated through Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars. Theoretically it was an executive branch answerable to the Soviet, but most of the members were appointed by the Bolsheviks. [9] There were no mass demonstrations on the streets when the Constituent Assembly of elected representatives was thrown out, because ‘it was only later that the people realised that the Bolshevik ship of state was on a straight course towards totalitarian dictatorship.’ [10] When reality dawned, many were prepared to resist that dictatorship, and Russia faced the bloodiest civil war in history.

The looting of the country’s wealth by the Bolsheviks began in earnest. The first steps had been taken several months earlier when the Wall Street bankers used an American ‘Red Cross Mission’ as their ‘operational vehicle’. [11] Unwilling to use diplomatic channels, agents of the ‘money power’ and big business had been sent to Russia disguised as Red Cross officials on what purported to be a generous act of American humanitarianism to help the suffering Russian masses. The ‘Red Cross’ party mainly comprised financiers, lawyers and accountants from New York banks and investment houses. Only a few doctors were involved. The international banks had bribed the American Red Cross through large financial donations and literally bought the franchise to operate in its name. [12]

In 1917 the American Red Cross depended heavily for support from Wall Street, specifically the J.P. Morgan organisation. Morgan and his associated financial and business elites were determined to control Russia’s vast assets after the Bolsheviks seized power. Head of the Red Cross mission to Russia, William Boyce Thompson, may have lacked the know-how to bandage a wound, but he was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and agent for J.P. Morgan’s British securities operation. [13] The genuine medical professionals originally attached to the mission were sent home within a few weeks. Thompson, however, retained fifteen businessmen and bankers from the New York financial elite who made up the bulk of the ‘Red Cross’ party. This was no mission of mercy. It might have been more accurately classified as a commercial or financial mission, but it also acted as a subversive political action group. [14]

Thompson, like Herbert Hoover, had made his fortune as a mining engineer before turning to finance and banking. He had visited Russia before the war, understood the value of its vast mineral wealth and fronted the Red Cross Mission to Russia as a vehicle for profiteering. He was interested in the potential Russian market and how this market could be influenced, diverted and captured for post-war exploitation by Wall Street. [15]

William Boyce Thompson, who was in Russia from July until November 1917, contributed $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks. His ‘generosity’ was criticised in America but the Washington Post reported that he made the financial contribution ‘in the belief that it will be money well spent for the future of Russia as well as the Allied cause’. [16] A sympathetic, controlled, press has always been a prerequisite for the Secret Elite cause. Wall Street banker, Thompson, developed a close friendship with Lenin and Trotsky. He used it to gain ‘profitable business concessions from the new government which returned their initial investment many times over’. [17] Members of the ‘Red Cross’ mission cared nothing for humanitarian relief or Bolshevism, socialism or communism. The only ‘ism’ they were interested in was capitalism, and how the Russian market could be influenced and manipulated for post-war exploitation. What does it tell us that Trotsky failed to mention the Red Cross mission or William Boyce Thompson or Jacob Schiff in his memoirs? When the Bolsheviks seized power, the Petrograd branch of the National City Bank of New York (of which Jacob Schiff was a director) was the only foreign bank they exempted from being nationalised. [18] Readers do not have to ask why.

1. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 89.
2. Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 131.
3. Ibid., p. 141.
4. Harold Whitmore Williams, The Spirit of the Russian Revolution, pp. 14-15.
5. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 36.
6. Griffin, Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 286.
7. Eugene Lyons began his journalistic career in Russia in the 1920s as an enthusiastic supporter of the new order in Russian society, but in witnessing the outrageous excesses of Stalin’s terror, the American writer came to loathe the regime.
8. Eugene Lyons, Workers Paradise Lost, p. 29.
9. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, p. 54.
10. Dimitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 95.
11. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 71.
12. Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 274.
13. Ibid., p. 275.
14. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 80.
15. Ibid., 97.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. Ibid.
18. Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 283.
19. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 83.

America 1917, 2: Promises Given, Promises Broken

The 1916 election proved to be very close indeed. What matters in an American Presidential election is the Electoral College vote of which, in 1912, there were 530, so the winner had to reach a minimum of 266.

When the first returns from the Eastern States were announced, Republican Charles Hughes appeared to have won by a landslide. By seven o’clock on 7 November it was certain that Wilson had lost New York and the other populous Northeastern States with their heavy votes in the Electoral College followed in swift succession; New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin and Delaware went Republican. It was a rout. [1] Apparently.

Election extras were quickly on the streets bearing huge portraits of ‘The President Elect, Charles Evans Hughes’. As night fell on Washington, strange forces spread across the United States. President Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty was instructed not to concede. He was reported to have received a mysterious, anonymous telephone message warning him ‘in no way or by the slightest sign give up the fight.’ [2] Remarkably the American historian and New York Herald Tribune journalist, Walter Millis wrote ‘Who it was he never knew; perhaps it was a miracle.’ Absurd. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Must we always be taken as fools? How many anonymous callers have the telephone number of the President’s private secretary or could order him not to concede the election? Malpractice was afoot.

In London, The Times pronounced, ’Mr Hughes Elected’ in a Republican landslide. Its sober conclusion was that Mr Wilson has been defeated not by, but in spite of his neutrality. [3] The Kolnische Volkrientung cheered that ‘German-Americans have defeated Wilson’, while in Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse claimed that Hughes had been elected to bring an end to an era where ‘the Steel Trust and the Bethlehem works may still make further profits and that the price of munitions shares may be whipped up still further while Morgan further extends his financial kingdom.’ [4] The inference was that the people had turned against the military – industrial profiteers. But they were all running ahead of themselves.

At daybreak on 8 November, while the New York Times conceded Wilson’s defeat, Tumulty remained unmoved. He was quietly informed that the rot had been stopped at Ohio by a margin of 60,000 votes. Colonel House ordered the Democratic Headquarters to put every county chairman in every doubtful state across America on high alert. They were urged to exercise their ‘utmost vigilance’ on every ballot box. [5] How odd that such instructions should be issued on the day following the election. What did House know that others did not? Projections of a Hughes’ victory shrank from certainty to doubt until the entire election result hung on the outcome from California. Secret Service agents and US Marshals were drafted into the largest Californian counties to guard ballot boxes and supervise proceedings. California, with 13 Electoral College votes in 1916, was pivotal to determining the winner. On 8 November, the Electoral vote stood at 264 to Wilson and 254 to Hughes.

Before the mystical, middle-of-the-night change of fortune, the Democrats had conceded California to the Republican challenger, but they declared their decision premature. After a two day recount, Wilson was declared winner by a mere 3,420 out of a total of 990,250 Californian votes cast. Talk of election-fraud and vote-buying prompted the Republican party to file legal protests, [6] but nothing significant materialised. They were effectively too late. While scrutiny of the returns showed minor vote-tallying errors, and affected both sides, these appeared to be random. Nothing fraudulent could be proved.

An angry and suspicious Republican Party refused to concede the election. The final recount in California showed that Wilson had gained 46.65% of votes cast and Hughes 46.27%. The Republican candidate baulked at accusing his rival of fraud. His final statement acknowledged ‘in the absence of absolute proof of fraud, no such cry should be raised to becloud the title of the next President of the United States.’ [7] ‘Absolute proof’ set a very high level of certainty. In New Hampshire the lead changed hands during the canvassing of returns and Wilson won the State by a mere 56 Votes. [8]

Vested interests jumped to close down the Republican options. In London, The Times could not believe that ‘the patriotic and shrewd men who manage the electioneering affairs of the Republican Party will attempt to impugn that decision [Wilson’s claim to victory] without clear and conclusive evidence.’ [9] Consider the pressure that was heaped upon Charles Hughes. War in Europe raged on. A newly elected government in the United States would have brought about a complete change in all of the key cabinet posts with consequent dislocation of existing ties. Imagine the confusion if a President Hughes had to appoint new ambassadors, new consuls, new State Department staff, new White House staff and so forth.

Woodrow Wilson (left) and Charles Hughes. We will never know who truly won the 1916 election

Colonel House told the President that ‘Germany almost to a man is wishing for your defeat and that France and England are almost to a man wishing for your success.’ [10] They weren’t wishing for his success, they were dependant on it. In the end, Wilson won more popular votes overall, (9,129,606 – 8,538,221) and no clear evidence of malpractice could be found. On 22 November Charles Hughes accepted the election result as it stood. His acquiescence did not go unrewarded. Charles Evans Hughes became United States Secretary of State between 1921 and 1925, a judge on the Court of International Justice between 1928 and 1930, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. His son, Charles Evans Hughes junior, was appointed Solicitor General by Herbert Hoover.

Primed by his jubilant backers, Woodrow Wilson demonstrated an unexpectedly theatrical touch at the start of his second term in office. Not since George Washington had a president delivered his first formal presidential address to the Senate itself. Wilson did this on 22 January, 1917 in a barnstorming speech which created the impression of an enlightened, benevolent master-statesman to whom the world ought to listen. He called for ‘peace without victory’ because:

‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.’ [11]

As rhetoric, this was stout stuff. As policy, it did not last for long. He claimed that his soaring vision for peace and the future was based on core American values unshackled by entangling alliances. [12] The shining centrepiece of his dazzling new utopia was to be a League of Nations which could enforce peace. The Senate sat mesmerised and many rose to salute him at the end of an impressive performance. Democrats waxed lyrical with claims that Wilson’s speech ‘was the greatest message of the century … the most momentous utterance that has a yet been made during this most extraordinary era …simply magnificent … the most wonderful document he has ever delivered.’ [13] His Republican rivals were more circumspect in their appraisal, describing it as ‘presumptuous’ and ‘utterly impractical.’

American newspapers split opinion in predictable fashion. The New York World saluted his principles of liberty and justice; the Philadelphia Public Ledger declared that Wilson’s oration was inspired by lofty idealism and the Washington Post thought it constituted a shining ideal. The conservative New York Sun caustically remarked that having failed for four years to secure peace with Mexico, Wilson had no business lecturing the world on the terms for peace with Europe, while The New York Herald warned that ‘Mr Wilson’s suggestion would lead to the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon nations … propaganda for which ‘has been in evidence for a quarter of a century.’ [14]

In Europe reaction was naturally selfish. The British government refused to countenance his proposal first and foremost because he had added a passage on freedom of the seas which challenged their divine right to dominate the oceans. Having shed rivers of blood on the fields of Flanders and beyond, the Europeans were not attracted to ‘peace without victory’. The French novelist, Anatole France, a Nobel Prizewinner for literature, likened peace without victory to ‘bread without yeast…mushrooms without garlic … love without quarrels … camel without humps’. [15]

But Wilson strode that world stage for darker reasons. Who, one wonders, whispered in his ear that all of his visionary pronouncements could not deliver a place at the high table of international settlement at the end of the war if America was not a participant? He could not logically take part in the final resolution of the conflict unless the United States was a full partner in absolute victory. Peace without victory was an empty promise, a misdirection to the jury of hope.

On 4 March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave his second inaugural address to Congress and proclaimed that America stood ‘firm in armed neutrality’ but warned that ‘we may even be drawn on by circumstances … to a more active assertion of our rights’. [16] Twenty-nine days later, on 2 April, he again addressed a joint Session of Congress. This time his purpose was to seek their approval for war with Germany. In a lofty speech he revisited the same moral high ground with which the Secret Elite and their agents in Britain had previously gone to war. With claims about saving civilisation, it might have been penned by Sir Edward Grey:

‘It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.’ [17]

America was encouraged to war in order to fight for democracy. The phrase has a familiar ring. What had caused this violent swing from peace to war in barely four months?

1. Cuddy, Irish Americans and the 1916 Election, American Quarterly vol. 21, no 2, Part 1 p. 235.
2. Walter Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 352.
3. The Times, 8 Nov. 1916, p. 9.
4. The Times, 18 Nov. 1916. p. 7.
5. Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 353.
6. Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, p. 202.
7. New York Times, 11 November 1916.
8. Foley, Ballot Battles: p. 431.
9. The Times, 13 November, 1916, p. 9.
10. H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 281.
11. Woodrow Wilson: Address to the Senate of the United States; World League for Peace, 22 January, 1917.
12. Ibid.
13. New York Times, 23 January, 1917, Scenes in the Senate.
14. New York Times, 23 January, 1917. Wilson’s Senate Speech – Press comments
15. Alfred Carter Jefferson, Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism, p. 195.
16. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/wilson1917inauguration.htm
17. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War against Germany, 2 April, 1917. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366

A Pause to Prepare and Finalise Book Two in the Hidden History Series

We have decided to pause our current series of blogs which takes our Hidden History of the First World War up to the end of 1916 to find the requisite time for the publication of book 2. This second publication will cover all of the major topics included so far in these posts.

In addition we will consider the fabrications, lies and deliberate obfuscations which still surround key elements of that terrible conflict as it spiralled like a whirlwind across the world before the shocking, inhumane tactics which obligated Germany to accept the Treaty of Versailles. Our research will be focused on contentious issues including:

• American financial and business dealings which expanded through the Allied access to Federal Reserve funds
• The Balfour Declaration and the dealings behind the scenes which clearly demonstrate the reasons why this misnamed letter of intent became a matter of international contention. Who benefitted within the context of the First World War?
• The entrance of the United States into a global conflict in which so many millionaires had been created, and from which they could continue to thrive. Who changed President Wilson’s mind?
• The Russian Revolution and the American involvement in 1916-17.
• The Armistice and the horrors which followed in the Allied drive to crush the German people.
• The Secret Elite and the Treaty of Versailles.

We are grateful to our many thousands of readers, to those who have sent welcome and valuable comments and additional insight, and those who have re-blogged our posts. Please keep our link open so that we can post you direct information when book 2 is ready for publication and our blogs can restart.

Remember always that we are lied to by governments and truth is constantly abused by pliant historians. We continue to find that evidence has been torn from official documents [1] , that correspondence is missing or cannot be found, and that unaccountable omissions in original accounts and diaries are glossed over or explained by laughable excuses.

Once again, thanks for your support

Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor

[1] Barely a fortnight ago while researching Foreign Office documents at the National Archives ini London (FO 899, Cabinet Memoranda 1905-18 volume IV.) we discovered that page 685, which followed a confidential memo on the work of the Committee for Relief in Belgium and German guarantees, had been blatantly ripped from the bound documentation. What secrets once lay within? Most likely we will never know. Whatever it was, the Establishment did not want it recorded.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 9: Secret Reports and Key Omissions

The Admiralty lied to the public throughout the war. It’s official reports and accounts of politically sensitive events like the sinking of the Lusitania and of the one major encounter at sea between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet have been discredited over the last century. [1] Nameless officials doctored ‘evidence’. Courts of Enquiry, especially that of the sinking of the Lusitania, were rigged and embarrassingly flawed. When he was First Sea Lord in 1920, Admiral Beatty falsified his own signature to battle plans concerning Jutland four years after the event. [2]

Immediately after the war the Conservative MP Commander Carolyn Bellairs wrote ‘The Jutland despatches withheld the truth about the battle; and Mr Balfour [First Lord of the Admiralty] who is said to have set aside responsible advice from within the Admiralty itself, refused to assemble a court-martial to inquire into all the circumstances. [By] Retaining Lord Jellicoe in command, he knew, and indeed asked the press, that criticism should be silenced.’ [3] This direct request to the press from the Secret Elite’s Arthur Balfour also covered the period when harsh questions were being asked about the fate of HMS Hampshire. ‘Criticism should be silenced.’ [4] What were they afraid of?

Bellairs had reached the rank of Commander after eighteen years service in the navy before becoming a journalist and politician in 1902. By 1915 he was Conservative member for Maidstone Borough and brought a great depth of knowledge and criticism to parliamentary debates on the navy. He and several other critics tackled the Admiralty’s apparent inability to answer relatively simple questions about the sinking of the Hampshire in a House of Commons debate in July 1916. [5] Despite requests that they should not raise difficult questions that might aid the enemy, many MPs wanted to know what was really going on. Firstly, why did the Admiralty reject a public enquiry into the loss of the Hampshire on 5 June at Marwick Head? Protocol laid down that whenever a ship was lost at sea, a public court-martial should be held with the survivors to ascertain precisely why. Lord Kitchener’s death commanded huge public interest and concern. Still there was no public enquiry.

Sir Richard Cooper correctly pointed out that in refusing to answer questions, the evasive Admiralty only added to wild speculation. They would not confirm whether the sea lane used by HMS Hampshire had been swept for mines. We know that it had not. Jellicoe admitted this in his own history of the Grand Fleet. [6] There was no credible answer to questions raised about the announcement of Lord Kitchener’s death. Cooper pointed out that the formal communique about the loss of the Hampshire was issued in London at 2pm on 6 June 1916, and that evening, the details of Kitchener’s memorial service at St Paul’s were made public before the War Office could reasonably assume that he had not survived. [7] Strange. The bodies picked out of the sea or caught smashed against the jagged rocks were collected and quickly buried. There was no coroner’s inquest, or since the jurisdiction was in Scotland, fatal accident inquiry. [8] It was as if the evidence had to be removed from the scene of the crime. Strange, indeed. To make matters worse, the Admiralty slapped a formal restriction on anyone going to or from the Orkneys on 7 June. Why did they want to keep journalists away from the island? Such restrictions could hardly have restricted spies, if such was the purpose. At every turn officials behaved as if there was something to hide.

The Secretary of the Admiralty issued a summary of the conclusions reached by Jellicoe’s own staff after they had interrogated the 12 survivors of the doomed ship. The Admiralty published their official statement on Saturday 10 June. [9] The narrative was brief and succinct to the point of mere repetition of what had already been published in the newspapers. It focussed on the weather, the unexpected mine and the dignity of Lord Kitchener as he bravely faced death. How fortunate that one of the witnesses, Petty Officer Wilfred Wesson [10] was able to confirm that Lord Kitchener was last seen on deck before the ship went down.

Many years later in a newspaper article [11] Wesson’s story offered food for thought. Despite the fact that the noise of storm and confusion was deafening, ‘there were orders being shouted. They were mostly being caught in the gale and lost… the wind howled ..immeasurable banks of waves burst in shivering cascades …and then Lord Kitchener came on deck. An officer shouted “Make way for Lord Kitchener”. The captain had called to him to come up to the fore bridge .. that was the last I saw of Lord Kitchener.’ [12] Putting aside journalistic license, we might well wonder how Petty Officer Wesson actually heard what he claimed to have borne witness to in the raging storm? However, what was important to the Admiralty was that they produced a witness who could confirm that Herbert Kitchener made it onto the deck, and so must have been lost with the captain and other senior officers.

During the House of Commons exchanges on 6 July 1916, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, Dr Macnamara, insisted that ‘a full and careful Court of Enquiry’ had been held and ‘a full summary of the report published’ covering the evidence from each survivor. [13] It would appear from subsequent evidence that questions were limited to ‘do you think the Hampshire hit a mine’ and ‘did you see Lord Kitchener?’ Why? Did they have reason to doubt that HMS Hampshire hit a mine? Were they concerned that some story of an internal explosion might raise other issues? And what did it matter if the Secretary of State for War was or was not seen on deck? It was as if the sailors were being asked leading questions.

The naval authorities did not consider it worthwhile to open an investigation on the allegations from the crew of the Aberdeen trawler, Effort, that the seas were much calmer when they passed the signs of wreckage or search for information from the Dutch trawler reported to have been around the scene of the sinking. [14] Commander Bellairs was once again on his feet to suggest that ‘one of the reasons why the Admiralty of late have taken a dislike to courts-martial is that … they have been known to bring in verdicts blaming the Admiralty. [15] He made one further startling statement: ‘Recently there has been a column in the newspapers about HMS Hampshire and the Battle of Jutland: some of us know that the Hampshire was never in the Battle of Jutland.’ [16]

What? The official order of battle would disagree – but Bellairs was the naval correspondent to War Illustrated and a member of parliament who had many connections inside the Admiralty. Surely he was wrong – or was this yet another alteration made after the event by Lord Jellicoe when he was promoted to First Sea Lord? [17] The more one learns of the Admiralty’s complicity in hiding the truth, the more one wonders what that truth really was.

Yet there was a full official report. It was kept secret. When asked in Parliament where the official enquiry had been held and who conducted it, the evasive answer given was ‘at a naval base under the presidency of a captain of the Royal Navy.’ [18] No names, dates or places. Little wonder suspicion of a cover-up began within a few days of Kitchener’s death.

Rumours ran rife. All of these muddied the waters with suggestions of foul play which ranged from an internal explosion masterminded by Sinn Fein in reprisal for the Easter Rising, to slack talk in Russia which had alerted the Germans who sent a submarine to sink the Hampshire. Such nonsense turned the public away from the most certain of facts. The Admiralty was at fault to the extent that we have every right to suggest complicity. Ten years after Kitchener’s death his friend and biographer, Sir George Arthur, had suffered so many queries about the ‘truth’ surrounding the sinking of the Hampshire that he wrote a public letter to the Editor of The Times [19] in which he exposed the Admiralty’s duplicity:

‘…early in 1920 the First Lord of the Admiralty (the late Lord Long)  invited me to read the secret , or unpublished, report on the sinking of the Hampshire, on the understanding that I would not divulge a word of it to anybody. I declined to read the document under these conditions, as my object was to give in my “Life of Lord Kitchener” the correct version of the tragedy – and this I could not do if material were in my hands which I was not allowed to use. I told the First Lord that I should submit in my book that neglect, or at any rate carelessness, must be charged to the Admiralty, or the Commander of the Grand Fleet, in the arrangements made for Lord Kitchener’s voyage. The reply of the First Lord was, “I do not think you could say otherwise.” [20]

The impact of this revelation hit the Admiralty like a naval broadside. There had been a secret report. There were ‘versions’ of the tragedy. ‘Neglect’ or ‘carelessness’ had been covered-up. George Arthur forced the issue. The Admiralty was obligated to print the official narrative of the sinking of the Hampshire in the form of a White Paper [21] which could be bought for sixpence in August 1926. It added little to the information which had dripped into the public domain save repeating statements already published. Indeed, having considered the lack of new revelations you would have to ask why this had not happened much earlier.

There is another important but contentious fact. According to naval records, HM Drifter Laurel Crown was one of eight boats in a flotilla crossing the site of the Hampshire’s sinking, when she was struck by one of the U-75’s mines on 22 June 1916, some seventeen days after the tragedy. There were no survivors. No-one to tell the tale. A number of concerns emerged.

The first was how could a small 81 ton drifter, literally a fishing boat pressed into minesweeping service, hit a carefully located mine placed some seven meters from the surface? [22] One of the most important factors that seemingly explained HMS Hampshire’s fate was that her weight and displacement on the surging seas combined to take the ship to sufficient depth to cause the collision of mine and cruiser. In theory the German trap laid by U-75 was set to catch much bigger fish than even the Hampshire. Yet a tiny drifter hit one of these mines? How bizarre.

Secondly, there is a clear difference in official records concerning the date of the Laurel Crown’s demise. In the document, ‘Navy Losses, 1914-1918’ published in 1919, the hired drifter Laurel Crown is recorded to have been “Sunk by mine west of Orkneys on 2.6.16”. [23] The official German naval history, [24] described the U-75’s voyage in May 1916 and recorded that ‘on June 2nd the drifter Laurel Crown ran into one of U75’s mines and was sunk.’ Thus both official records from the major combatants clearly stated that the Laurel Crown was sunk on 2 June, 1916. [25] Given that these official naval records corroborate each other, the Admiralty must have known of U75’s mine barrier. It would have been abundantly clear to the authorities at Scapa Flow that there was a minefield sewn across the path of HMS Hampshire. Are you prepared to believe that in the confusion after the Battle of Jutland, reports of the trawler’s sinking were delayed, ignored, or otherwise unknown to the senior staff in Scapa Flow?

However, records from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the crewmen of Laurel Crown give their date of death as Thursday 22 June 1916. That is the same date recorded by the Court of Inquiry held in Kirkwall a week later [26]. Have these too been adjusted to suit the Admiralty’s cover-up? The sinking of Laurel Crown is not included in the official British naval history, “Naval Operations, Volume IV” written by Henry Newbolt and published in 1928. [27] How odd. Official dates, altered dates, strange omissions. For reasons that have never been challenged, the sinking of the Laurel Crown has been relegated to claims and counter claims about the date of its demise.

If, as is surely the case, the official records in Britain and in Germany are correct, Lord Kitchener, his party, and around 700 seamen were sacrificed to ensure that he was lost at sea. Do not be dissuaded by the enormity of the cost. Barely one month later on the killing fields of the Somme, hundreds of thousands more brave men were  needlessly sacrificed in the name of civilisation. Crushing Germany was all that mattered. One more ship was easily lost in the fog of Jutland’s confusion.

[1] Carolyn Bellairs, The Battle of Jutland, The Sewing and the Reaping. 1919.
[2] John Brooks, The Battle of Jutland, p. 307, footnote 198.
[3] Bellairs, Jutland, Preface, p. X.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1796-813.
[6] Viscount Jellicoe, The Grand Fleet (!914-1916): Its Creation, Development and Work, p. 427, where he states that had he ordered the seas ahead of HMS Hampshire swept, Kitchener would have lost three days in consequence. Alas it was his life that was lost.
[7] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1796-813.
[8] In Scottish Law a fatal accident inquiry would have been the appropriate means of investigation. This legal process would take place before a Sheriff and does not require a jury.
[9] Details given in Parliament. See House of Commons Debate 22 June 1916 vol. 83 cc316-3.
[10] Wesson’s service number was PO201136(PO). A full list of survivors and their identification number was published.
[11] Sunday Express, 8 July, 1934.
[12] Jane Storey, HMS Hampshire, Survivors and Their First Statements, http://www.bjentertainments.co.uk/js/survivors.htm%5D
[13] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1813.
[14] see previous blog
[15] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1813
[16] Ibid.
[17] http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jutland-wwis-greatest-sea-battle
[18] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 27 June 1916 vol 83 cc732-3.
[19] The Times, 10 February, 1926, p.10.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Cmd. 2710.
[22] Fregattenkapitän Oskar Groos. Der Krieg zur See 1914-18, Nordsee Band V pp. 201-2.
[23] National Archives ADM 137/3138.
[24] Groos, Der Krieg zur See 1914-18, Nordsee Band V.
[25] https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwj6-fzEvfrMAhVLDsAKHU30Am4QFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rbls-kirkwall.org.uk%2Fmemorials%2FBur%2FGeorgePetrie.doc&usg=AFQjCNFPMO_PWaZWiQp6oJ3o_ONhNn72Ig&sig2=XPyFHttCwB_DkKyUPnrp_Q
[26] National Archives ADM 137/3138
[27] Henry Newbolt, History of the Great War, Based on Official Documents. Naval Operations, Vol IV, pp. 1-21.

John Buchan 4: A Troubled Legacy That Should Be Resolved

Buchan’s fiction-writing about a world of spies and counter-intelligence was a reflection of his real-life experience, as was the South African background he gave to many of his heroes. It was based in fact laced with nostalgia and propaganda. There is no doubt that both directly and indirectly he was intent on winning the propaganda battle in the war against Germany, both at home and in America. He was after all Director of Information. Buchan had been approached by Charles Masterman, who was married to his wife’s cousin, to be part of the massive propaganda assault on Germany. It was a task he relished from his sick-bed in 1914 to his numerous post war publications. His world of fiction was sucked into the vortex of justification for Britain’s declaration of war and John Buchan’s eponymous creation, Richard Hannay, [1] became the ultimate hero of First World War espionage and counter-espionage. Hannay, as his invention, was the man Buchan wished he had been: a gentleman, the outdoor – type, at home in the Veldt and on the Scottish moors; honourable, an Empire loyalist and fighting soldier, who survived Loos, though wounded, and the hell that was the Somme. Richard Hannay was the boy’s own hero that Buchan never was. Oddly enough, though he never fired a rifle or fought in the trenches, Buchan ended the war with the rank of Colonel [2] while Hannay made it to Brigadier. [3]

Richard Hannay was, from the opening sentence of The Thirty-Nine Steps, ‘pretty well disgusted with life’ and had ‘got his pile’, as a mining engineer in South Africa. Looking for an adventure Hannay became engaged in a world of spies, of the looming danger of war in Europe and of German plots to destroy the British fleet. Buchan penned the ‘shocker’, as this short novel was them termed, while confined to bed in 1914. It was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in instalments between August and September 1915, and in book form in October. How many of us who read the gripping tale before we reached our teens realised that it was written as part of a propaganda campaign? And because of that, what influence did it have on our understanding of the causes of war? It is important to consider that question seriously. In 2014, The Thirty-Nine Steps was voted number thirty-two in the Guardian newspaper’s top one hundred novels written in the English language. [4] It is still read in innocence.

From within the text of a boys-own adventure, Buchan gave his hero knowledge of the coming war and occasionally betrayed information that had been openly denied in Parliament. Hannay, ‘just happens’ to meet a French Staff Officer on a boat coming back from West Africa who assured him that despite ‘all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real working knowledge between France and Britain, and that the two General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for joint action in case of war’. [5] By 1915, Buchan could dismiss the lies to Parliament about secret alliances which had been repeated by both prime minister Asquith and foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey from 1906-1914, with implied approval and acknowledged good sense. It was a subtle and clever move which presumed that by 1915, the reader would appreciate the value of senior elected politicians’ hoodwinking parliament.

A second theme which began in The Thirty-Nine Steps was that the old Liberal political thinking was ‘the most appealing rot’. When Liberals dismissed the “German Menace” and saw it as a Tory invention to cheat the poor and restrain the great flood of social reform, Buchan’s hero shook his head sadly. With that glorious strain of upper-middle-class superiority, Hannay dismissed the appeal for peace and reform with the patronising aside that ‘you could see the niceness of the chap shining out behind the muck he had been spoon-fed.’ [6] Later, the same Liberal character is described as ‘as good a chap as ever breathed, but his idiot of an uncle has stuffed his head with maggots’. [7] The propagandist view was that the well-intentioned, but fundamentally flawed pacifist and anti-war movement, was for the weak-minded. It was all part of the high-powered justification of the war. Consequently, a century later the unsuspecting reader receives biased views on the causes of the war expressed as truth, though the facts have been roundly criticised in the light of historic evidence, and does not realise that she or he is one more victim of propaganda.

His Richard Hannay novels offer a unique insight into the minds of the Secret Elite and their friends as the war progressed. In Greenmantle, (published 1917) enclosed within the dust-jacket of what was taken as fiction, he revealed the Foreign Office fixation with the Ottomans, the vast array of spies and business links that fed information to London and expounded the trusted views of the British Establishment. Thus the complex machinations behind British policy towards Turkey at the start of the war, where two dreadnoughts, built in Britain for the Turkish navy were commandeered, and the German battlecruiser Goeben, and light battlecruiser, Breslau, were literally shepherded into the Bosphorus to protect Constantinople from the Russians, is presented as how Turkey ‘had left the rails’; [8] not as part of an analysis on why Turkey had allied itself to Germany. The Young Turk leader, Enver, is described as a ‘Polish adventurer’, and his colleagues as ‘a collection of Jews and gypsies’ who took control of a ‘proud race’ by dint of German money and Germany arms. Racial and religious prejudice is excused today as ‘how it was’ without a blush of apology.

The over-riding theme was that a Jehad was in the offing and the wicked Germans were orchestrating evil. ‘Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other’. [9] Sadly Buchan would find many of his countrymen nodding in agreement at such stereotyping a century later. And what would be endangered was the British Empire; India, in particular. Readers were assured that ‘Germany’s like a scorpion: her sting’s in her tail and that tail stretches way down into Asia’. [10] In Mr Standfast, (published 1919) the real enemy is a German super-spy who is trying to influence the world toward a peace settlement which will end the war before Germany is crushed. But Buchan used the novel to attack anyone and everyone who stood against the war or argued for an end to the conflict. One older man was described as being ‘the sort who, if he had been under fifty, would have crawled on his belly to his tribunal to get exempted’. [11] When asked to play the role of a pacifist, Hannay ‘looked forward to it with naked shame’. Criticism of generals like Buchan’s friend from Oxford, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, was ‘idiotic’ and the critic was dismissed was an ‘honest crank’ who had somehow ‘lost his self respect.’ [12] This was the world of the ‘half-baked, the people whom this war hasn’t touched or has touched in the wrong way’. [13] And we read it as truth.

Like Milner, Buchan had an intrinsic faith in the soundness of the British working man whom he considered decent, loyal and sensible. He  made no detailed reference to the expendable nature of troops sacrificed by his employers at Loos or the Somme. The carnage and true horror of war was softened into warm words and platitudes which brooked no criticism of the military elite. This fondness for the stout hearted Tommy found expression both in his novels and in his historical works where he repeatedly stated that the war was won by the rank and file. [14] While he had no time for the philosophy of pacifism, and especially for the notion that the war should be brought to a peaceful end, Buchan expressed sympathy for certain individual pacifists who died in the fighting.

In Mr Standfast, the misguided Fabian, Launcelot Wake, finds redemption, [15] in Buchan’s eyes, by serving at the front as a non-combatant conscientious objector whose ‘only weapons … were his brains’. [16] Wake never fired a shot, but was invaluable in carrying vital messages between endangered wings of an assault. Even so, most of Buchan’s fictional heroes came from the ranks of privilege; from Eton, Oxford and the London clubs from where his lasting friendships emanated.

Was any other figure so magnificently placed to be a true and loyal servant of the Secret Elite? He literally chose who and what to include in his histories thus guaranteeing that the powers behind the decision-makers in government remained unnamed.

Professor Carroll Quigley explicitly placed John Buchan in the outer circle of Society of the Elect, the group whom we have expanded into the Secret Elite. [17] Like every other major contributor to the legacy of Rhodes and Milner, John Buchan received his due reward. As we demonstrated in our previous blog, after a relatively undistinguished political career as a Tory MP in the post-war period, Buchan was elevated to the peerage and appointed by a grateful monarch to be the Governor General of Canada in 1935. His qualification for the highly prestigious post as the King’s representative in the great Dominion was his service to the Empire’s cause. He was the right sort. He belonged to the secret cabal that held absolute power in the foreign office and the colonial office. His was a safe pair of hands.

But what of his propaganda? His prodigious histories of the war [18] are now largely ignored, and the suggestion that the concentration camps in South Africa were turned into health resorts, [19] conveniently forgotten. This has always been the establishment’s way of burying the truth; ignore it, even when it is a despicable lie. But his novels? They are still reprinted regularly in the twenty-first century, still promoted as adventure stories for, though not exclusively for, the younger reader. Richard Hannay in particular is the star of at least three films and an exceptionally funny stage play. At no point do the publishers or producers give warning that the content originated in war-time propaganda. But the notion that Germany caused the war, that ‘right-minded’ British and overseas soldiers fought for ‘civilisation’, that those who sought peace were somehow disloyal and weak-minded, pervades the novels, as secure in its rigid certainty as the Highland moors over which Buchan’s hero trod.

It’s time to come clean. This work is grounded in propaganda.  A century on, should our children not be made aware of the primary purpose of these novels?

[1] The Complete Richard Hannay Stories published as a Wordsworth Classic, is a compilation of all five Hannay adventures. The Thirty-Nine Steps, (1915) Greenmantle, (1916) Mr Standfast, (1919) The Three Hostages (1924) and The Island of Sheep (1936). The first three are riddled with war-time propaganda and written with this in mind.
[2] Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Hew Strachan, John Buchan and the First World War, p. 79.
[3] Ibid., p. 84.
[4] Robert McCrum, The Guardian, 7 July 2014.
[5] John Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wordsworth Classics, p. 38.
[6] Ibid., p. 43.
[7] Ibid., p. 71.
[8] Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth Classics, Greenmantle, p.104.
[9] Ibid., p. 105.
[10] Ibid., p. 205.
[11]  Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth Classics, Mr Standfast, p. 308.
[12] Ibid., p. 317.
[13] Ibid., p. 319.
[14] MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Hew Strachan, John Buchan and the First World War, p. 84.
[15] MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Nathan Waddell, Buchan and the Pacifists, p. 99.
[16] Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth Classics, Mr Standfast, p.550.
[17] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[18] John Buchan wrote A History of the War published by Thomas Nelson from 1914-1918, A History of the Great War in four volumes, published in 1923, The Battle of Jutland, published in 1916, The Battle of the Somme, published in 1917, Britain’s war by land, published in 1915, Days to Remember,: The British Empire in the Great War, in conjunction with Henry Newbolt and published in 1922.
[19] John Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 108.

John Buchan 2: The Secret Elite’s Special Propaganda Weapon

During his time in South Africa, where his success in glossing over and deflecting criticism of the horrors of the concentration camps earned him the trust and gratitude of Alfred Milner and the Secret Elite, Buchan became acquainted with senior military figures under Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. By 1914 these men constituted the High Command of the British Army, though Roberts had nominally retired. [1] His friendship with Richard Haldane, the creator of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and Secretary of State for War from 1905-12 opened doors for him at the War Office. His friends included such luminaries as General Sir John French, who was to command the BEF and General Sir Henry Wilson, the architect of the British Expeditionary Force’s preparations in Belgium.

His faith in Douglas Haig also dated back to South Africa, and of course his Oxford connections, [2] though that is hardly justification for the slant he put on Haig’s military capability. Just as he gave his loyalty to Alfred Milner, John Buchan stood by Haig and defended him from his worst detractors, describing the Field Marshal as ‘first and foremost a highly competent professional soldier’. Some would disagree. [3] Whether it was simply through friendship and loyalty that John Buchan steadfastly defended the incompetence and failures of the British High Command during and after the war we will never know, but it was certainly a constant feature of the propaganda he presented as  history.

Buchan experienced an extraordinary period in his life between 1914-1918 embroiling himself in recording a version of the official history of the war, reporting from the Western Front for The Times, in propaganda work of a more general nature, in military intelligence, where part of his remit included writing speeches and communiques for Douglas Haig, and as the government’s Director of Information. Many readers will have assumed that he was just a Scottish story-writer. Not so. The war made him a household name as a novelist and as a historian. [4] The rest of the multi-layered duties he undertook for the Secret Elite were hidden from the public eye.

John Buchan operated within the most powerful group of men in the British Empire. He breakfasted with Sir Edward Grey two days before the declaration of war on Germany [5] and later praised the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in glowing terms: ‘Sir Edward Grey played under supreme difficulties a part which must rank amongst the most honourable achievements of British statesmen.‘ [6] He claimed that ‘It is not too much to say that the honour and liberty of our race’ were saved by our rushing to the assistance of our, as he put it, martyred ‘little neighbour.’ (Belgium) [7] Even although these words were penned in 1936, the propaganda machine held to the old lie of innocent Belgium.

He was quite ill in 1914 when war broke out. At thirty-nine Buchan was too old for enlistment, but his ineligibility to join the ranks was caused by serious digestion problems which developed into a duodenal ulcer. He was confined to bed for ‘three miserable months’. [8] It was a malaise which plagued him throughout the rest of his life. Buchan was a workaholic; of that there can be no doubt and his restless nature did not easily lend itself to inaction.

Buchan claimed that by 14 August 1914, he came up with the idea to write a popular history of the war for the publisher, Thomas Nelson and Sons, in order to keep the workforce fully employed. [9] He had been invited to become a partner in the firm in 1907 on the personal invitation of his Oxford friend, Tommy Nelson [10] and served as their literary adviser. Strange that he began writing Nelson’s History of the War to keep men in work at the point when so many had enlisted for the war. A cynic might wonder if his family ties to Charles Masterman, who had been appointed head of the secret War Propaganda Bureau had more bearing on the decision. In fact, Masterman secured the services of both John Buchan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle along with other popular authors like H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Ford Maddox Ford, Rudyard Kipling and G.K. Chesterton to promote and support the war through propaganda. [11]

Buchan became an integral figure in the propaganda machine. He quickly found that the foremost  limitation on what he could write was the truth. In his own words, he knew too much ‘and was often perplexed as to what I could print.’ [12] This is an unusually frank confession from a propaganda-insider. John Buchan confessed that he was unable to write the truth for an official history of the war. How much credence, therefore, should one give to his account of proceedings? And it was a widely read account. His Nelson’s History of the War appeared in fortnightly parts. It was published in instalments of 50,000 words and had by far the largest circulation of any war commentary at the time. [13]

The Canadian academic, Professor Peter Buitenhuis holds a very clear view on Buchan’s writings. ‘His entire History of the War is a work of propaganda, consistently giving the most positive slant to news from all fronts of the war. Through embellishing tales of advance and suppressing reports of staff incompetence, Buchan … consistently  falsified the British Military situation on the Western Front. The gulf between what he knew and the content of his narrative turned Nelson’s history into a propaganda text.’ [14] This is unquestionably true.

1915 was a profitable year for Buchan. He gave a series of popular lectures on the course of the war, [15] to huge gatherings at the Beckstein Hall in London, at which he was regularly accompanied  by high profile members of the Secret Elite including Sir Edward Grey and former prime minister, Arthur Balfour.  His journalistic career blossomed when The Times asked him to visit the front line troops and pen a series of articles exclusively for their readers. The first of these ‘On A Flemish Hill’ combined a panoramic view of landscapes which had suffered war and bloody battle for 2,000 years with the illusion of Ypres which from afar ‘looks like a gracious and delicate little city in its cincture of green hills.’

His shock at finding Ypres doomed beyond hope with its Cloth Hall in ashes and the skeletal remains of the famous towers of St Martin’s church threatening to fall any moment, brought a different kind of reality to The Times readership. [16] But John Buchan was not employed to charm the middle class with fine description. It was his conclusion which mattered. ‘It [Ypres] will stand as a symbol of unity within our race and unity within our Western civilisation, that true alliance and that lasting unity that are sealed by a common sacrifice.’ Rousing stuff, aimed to reassure the Empire, but fiction nevertheless.

Buchan’s work for Northcliffe’s newspapers continued from May till October 1915 from the otherwise restricted confines of the British Army Headquarters in France. Even his entirely one-sided accounts could give offence to the military censor, and his despatch from the Front on 7 October was withheld, an infringement which was criticised in Parliament. Apparently his writings provided the enemy with too much relevant information and too many accurate maps. And that is the problem with John Buchan. His use of fact, in this given instance troop movement, might have been accurate, but the praise that he lavished on the military commanders was so unjustifiably gilt-edged that he wandered into falsehood. We acknowledge that every country at war indulges in propaganda to favour its actions, but the real problem begins when those in charge repeatedly lie to cover-up the horror they have created, deny their failures and hoodwink the public.

Throughout the war, John Buchan continued to work for the upper reaches of government. While in France he was promoted to major in the intelligence corps and prepared military summaries and communiques which shed the best possible light on the British commanders. In 1916 he was regularly employed by the Foreign Office on matters of intelligence for his friend, Sir Edward Grey, and reported directly to him. He was also attached to Douglas Haig’s staff in France and made numerous visits to his headquarters. [17]

He was with him during the critical weeks of the Somme and wrote most of Haig’s dispatches during that period. He claimed that on the first day of the Somme, the Germans ‘had fallen into every trap we [Haig and his advisors] have laid.’ [18] With hindsight it seems a ludicrous comment, though Haig had hoped to use the battle on the Somme as a feint which would pull German reserves from Flanders and weaken them there. In a war of  attritional stupidity, the Somme stands as testament to brutal obstinacy. A million British and German casualties were sacrificed in an area of seven square miles. John Buchan wrote the communiques for Haig’s General Headquarters without a word of criticism about Douglas Haig’s incompetence. At no point did he allow personal loyalty to be undermined by fact.

When the Secret Elite at last removed Herbert Asquith from the post of Prime Minister in December 1916, Buchan’s mentor, Lord Alfred Milner joined the inner war-cabinet led by David Lloyd George. John Buchan’s star rose accordingly. He was summoned directly to the War Cabinet at 10 Downing Street where he renewed old friendships [19] and accepted the challenge of ‘improving’ propaganda. His proposals on reconstructing its policy was delivered within one month and the Secret Elite network put its own man in charge. Lord Milner proposed that Buchan be appointed director of a new department of information on 9 February 1917, and it was created by a cabinet minute that very day. He liaised directly with the prime minister and was given a salary of £1000 p.a. [20]. A Private on the line received just over £18 per year. John Buchan, who never faced a bullet, was well paid for his services.

He proved to be a moderate innovator. Buchan divided the department of information into four sections: (1) art and literature, (2) press and cinema, (3) intelligence, (4) administration, which he located inside the Foreign Office. He increased the scale of government propaganda considerably and developed the use of film in British propaganda to condition the home population and convince it of the noble cause of the ‘war for civilisation’.

The two large-scale propaganda films were D.W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1917) and Herbert Brenon’s The Invasion of Britain (not completed until the end of the war and never shown). Many newsreels were added to capture the imagination of cinema audiences. He commissioned a film about the Battle of the Somme, brought in professional writers, created a department of information in New York, sent out lecturers, and tirelessly organised every avenue of propaganda. Behind the façade of the gentlemanly amateur, Buchan was a tough and professional propagandist. [21]

In March 1918 the department became a ministry under Lord Beaverbrook, and John Buchan, by then a Colonel, became director of intelligence. Ironically, at the end of the war Buchan was appointed ‘liquidator’ of the Ministry of Information, which he closed down on 31 December 1918. It is an interesting concept, is it not? Liquidator of the Ministry of Information sounds too close to a special section from 1984. What did they immediately want rid of, or required to be shredded, shelved in secret places, removed, withdrawn and otherwise destroyed? Strange that an author should take on such a task.

[1] John Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 111.
[2] Both men attended Brasenose College at Oxford and had family roots in the Scottish Borders.
[3] Without a doubt, Denis Winter,’s exposure of Douglas Haig is the clearest indictment of the failures of that British commander. We recommend his book, Haig’s Command.
[4] Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, p. 78.
[5] Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 61.
[6] John Buchan, Episodes of the Great War, p. 23.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p.164
[9] Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 61.
[10] Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 137.
[11] [http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/masterman.htm
[12] Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 167.
[13] H.C.G. Mathew, Buchan, John, First Baron Tweedsmuir, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[14] Keith Grieves, Nelson’s History of the War, John Buchan as a Contemporary Military Historian, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 28, no.3, July 1993, p. 533.
[15] The Times, 21 April, 1915, p. 5.
[16] The Times, 17 May, 1915, p. 9.
[17] Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 65.
[18] Denis Winter, Haig’s Command, p. 181.
[19] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 169.
[20] Gary Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, p. 89.
[21] Mathew, Buchan, John, First Baron Tweedsmuir, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.