(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)
When Churchill set to work after WW II on his six volume war history, aides working with him to fact-check soon realized that, like all of us, he recalled some things with great accuracy and others with not such great accuracy.
This from David Reynolds’ In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War:
His pilot for the 10,000-mile round-trip to Cairo and Moscow via Teheran was an American, Captain Bill Vanderkloot, who, Churchill records, had already flown about 1,000,000 miles in his career.
[Life Magazine’s] skeptical staffers eventually tracked down Vanderkloot, who explained that he had been an airline pilot for five years and had ferried U.S. planes across the Atlantic for the RAF, making some seventy such crossings before the trip to Cairo.
In other cases, however, Churchill’s memory seems to have been shakier. In successive drafts, the bulletproof glass in Molotov’s Moscow limousine was reduced in thickness from an inch and a quarter to half an inch, before expanding again to two inches. (pg. 286)
0 comments:
Post a Comment