Last time I showed you a whole selection of what could be called “mistaken identity” conspiracy theories. Leslie Howard was erroneously identified therefore by the German intelligence service, the “Abwehr”, as Harold Thompson, Churchill’s bodygard.
Here’s Leslie Howard, in the wonderful anti-war play by RC Sheriff, “Journey’s End”…..
And here’s Harold Thompson (on the right), a man who was frequently appalled by Churchill’s apparently total disregard for his own safety. The best example of that was when Churchill stopped his staff car in Hyde Park and jumped out, armed with a Colt revolver, to do battle with the three members of the Irish Republican Army who were trying to assassinate him…….
……..sometimes Leslie Howard was identified as Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, despite the biggest hairy caterpillar in the world, that he had trained to cling to his top lip, irrespective of weather conditions…….
Sometimes the Germans confused Leslie Howard with Reginald Mitchell, the designer of the Spitfire, and in the grave for the past six years :
And, an Old Boy of Nottingham High School, Alfred Chenhalls, Leslie Howard’s business manager, was repeatedly thought to be Winston Churchill. Bald, cigar smoking and fond of whisky, who else could it be?
Another rather different theory suggests that Leslie Howard rather than Churchill, was the real target of those eight Luftwaffe aircraft. By now, Howard had become a hard core enemy of the Third Reich, reverting back to his origins as……
“a Jew who was a ferocious and prominent critic of Nazism”
By 1943, Howard frequently expressed himself much more actively than merely speaking up occasionally in interviews.
Indeed, he was soon not just starring in anti-German propaganda films, but he was directing and producing them himself, using as much of his own money as he dared.
On one occasion, his royalties from “Gone with the Wind” paid for his anti-Nazi productions. And in those movies, Howard did not hesitate to name and shame. In one film, he speaks of the Germans’ plans for the rest of Mankind, the people who had suffered the dreadful fate of not being born German. Howard was sure that Hitler would destroy for ever the political systems they had adopted…….
“Every day reveals the utter and desperate determination to smash us to bits, root and branch and to wipe out every trace of democracy.”
But……
“we are better than them”
In 1941, Howard made a fifteen minute film entitled “From the Four Corners” (1941). This is a still from it:
And here is a speech that may well make the hair stand up on the back of your neck :
“And so our fathers’ minds crept along and their ideas of justice and tolerance and the rights of man took shape in the sunlight and the smoke, sometimes standing still, sometimes even slipping back, but slowly broadening with the centuries. Some of those ideas are written down in the constitutions of our commonwealth and some are unwritten. We just try and carry them in our hearts and in our minds. Perhaps the men who came nearest to putting them into words were those Americans, many of them the sons of British pioneers, who, founding an independent nation, proclaimed:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those words and that spirit were born and nourished here, and your fathers carried them to the ends of the earth. They are our inheritance from the past, our legacy to the future. That’s why you came here – to defend them.”
Here is a link to the complete film. It is fifteen minutes that may well reaffirm your faith in good old fashioned democracy:
In “Pimpernel Smith”, he discusses Nazi philosophy with the film’s head of the SS, who has just captured Howard, the man who has helped countless political prisoners to escape from Germany:
“von Graum : Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man.
Smith : May a dead man say a few words to you for your enlightenment?
You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still you will have to go on, because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words…”
You can watch the complete film of “Pimpernel Smith” if you click on this link :
Having said that, the film is so good that you may wish to buy a much better quality DVD of it for around £10.
Like millions of people in the world, Leslie Howard had little reason to love the Germans, but, as a Jew, the appalling anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis in the 1930s really sealed the deal.
Howard wrote: “Britain’s destiny has been to uphold tolerance in religion, thought, speech, and race–– the mainspring of democracy. We have still far to travel on the road to true democracy, but only the Germans have made no progress in this direction. Britain, with her great gifts has helped populate five continents and shown that the white man and the coloured man can live in peace together.”
Few of us, more than eighty years later, would quarrel with those sentiments.
John Knifton 