Irving dealt with Churchill's performance as a wartime leader, first as Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty and then as Prime Minister. The British historian adverted to Churchill's "great military defeat in Norway, which he himself engineered and pioneered," and mentioned the suspicion of Captain Ralph Edwards, who was on Churchill's staff at the time, that Churchill had deliberately caused the fiasco to bring down Neville Chamberlain and replace him as prime minister, which subsequently happened.
Irving spoke of Dunkirk:
In May 1940, Dunkirk, the biggest Churchill defeat of the lot. It wasn't a victory. It wasn't a triumph. Nothing for the British to be proud of. Dunkirk? If you look at the Dunkirk files in the British archives now, you will find, too, you're given only photocopies of the premier files on Dunkirk with mysterious blank pages inserted. And you think, at first, how nice of them to put these blank pages in to keep the documents apart. Not so. The blank pages are the ones that you really want to be seeing. In some cases, of course, the blank pages are genuinely censored with intelligence matters. But the other blank pages are letters between Churchill and the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, which revealed the ugly truth that Churchill, himself, gave the secret order to Lord Gort, the British General in command of the British expeditionary force at Dunkirk, "Withdraw, fall back," or as Churchill put it, "Advance to the coast." That was Churchill's wording. "And you are forbidden to tell any of your neighboring allies that you are pulling out. The French and the Belgians were left in the dark that we were pulling out.
I think it's the most despicable action that any British commander could have been ordered to carry out, to pull out and not tell either his allies on his left and right flanks that he was pulling out at Dunkirk. The reason I knew this is because, although the blanks are in the British files, I got permission from the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud's widow. His widow is still alive. A dear old lady about 95, living in Paris. And guiding her trembling hand, I managed to get her to sign a document releasing to me all the Prime Minister's files in the French National Archives in Paris. And there are documents, the originals of the documents which we're not allowed to see in London. and there we know the ugly truth about that other great Churchill triumph, the retreat to Dunkirk. If peace had broken out in June of 1940, Churchill would have been finished. No brass statue in Parliament Square for Mr. Winston Churchill. He would have been consigned to the dustbin of oblivion, forgotten for all time and good riddance I say, because the British Empire would have been preserved. We would, by now, have been the most powerful race -- can we dare use the word, the British race, the most powerful race on Earth.
Irving pointed out that Churchill rejected Hitler's peace offers in 1939, 1940, and 1941. (Irving supports the thesis that Rudolf Hess's flight to Scotland was ordered by the Führer). Irving pinpointed one critical moment, and supplied the background:
The crucial moment when he managed to kill this peace offensive in England was July 1940. If we look at the one date, July the 20th, this I think was something of a watershed between the old era of peace, the greatness of the British Empire and the new era, the new era of nuclear deterrent and the holocaust, the nuclear holocaust. July 20, 1940: Mr. Churchill is lying in bed that Sunday out in Chequers, when he gets a strange message. It's an intercept of a German ambassador's telegram in Washington to Berlin. It's only just been revealed, of course, that we were reading all of the German codes -- not only the German Army, Air Force and Navy Codes, but also the German embassy codes. And if you're silly enough to believe everything that's written in the official history of British Intelligence, you will understand that the only reason that they released half of the stories is to prevent us from trying to find out the other half. And what matters is that we are reading the German diplomatic codes as well. On July 20th, the German ambassador in Washington sent a message to Berlin saying that the British ambassador in Washington had asked him very quietly, very confidentially, just what the German peace terms were. This, of course, was the one thing that Churchill could never allow to happen, that the British find out what Hitler's peace terms are. He sends an immediate message to the foreign office, to Lord Halifax, saying, "Your ambassador in Washington is strictly forbidden to have any further contacts with the German ambassador, even indirectly." They were communicating through a Quaker intermediary.
Now, on the same day, Churchill sent a telegram to Washington ordering Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, to have nothing to do with the German ambassador. And the same day, he takes
