We butchered the wrong pig

“In the name of humanity; Broke the staff over them. Too much talking.” Not sure about the precise translation, but the Nazi message is clear: FDR and Churchill, with Stalin’s help, executing liberty. (Der St;rmer, Berlin, June 1943.) 
NOT CHURCHILL, RE GERMANY: “WE BUTCHERED THE WRONG PIG”
NOT CHURCHILL, RE GERMANY: “WE BUTCHERED THE WRONG PIG”
 23 January 2020 Comments 5 Comments
A German correspondent writes:

Churchill is misquoted as saying—with reference to the Nazis versus the Soviets—‘We butchered [or slaughtered] the wrong pig.’ The implication: he should have fought Stalin, not Hitler. This seems to me revisionist wishful thinking. He could never have said that, since there is no such idiom in English. He would have had to say, “We fought the wrong enemy.” Can you reveal some authentic information as to the origin of this misquotation?

Several queries along these lines followed publication of Herbert Kuhner’s A Revival of Revisionism in Austria. Apparently Kuhner gave the source as Lord Boothby. (The website says it is currently under revision.)

Wrong pig – wrong quote
If I may digress into amusement, Churchill would have found this phrase offensive to pigs. He did use animal analogies, and could have invented such an idiom. But he liked pigs. He never compared Britain’s enemies to porkers. His favorite animal villains were tigers, jackals, hyenas, crocodiles and boa constrictors….

I searched the Hillsdale College Churchill Project digital scans of Churchill’s canon, some 80 million words by and about him. This includes virtually everything in his books, articles, speeches and published papers. I found no instance of this phrase, either with the word “slaughtered” or the word “butchered.” Nor the words “wrong pig.” Neither did I find any statement of his suggesting Britain had “fought the wrong enemy.” This includes the memoirs of Lord Boothby.

The primary enemy
One of Churchill’s virtues was to recognize the main threat to civilization at each juncture in his career. From 1933 to 1945, he was certain that Nazi Germany was that threat. He did begin to think, late in the war, that one mortal foe had given rise to another. But he always kept things in perspective.

His change of view as the war wound down was obvious. Here is a key private remark recorded by his private secretary, John Colville, on 23 February 1945. The venue was Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence. The source is Colville’s diaries, The Fringes of Power (1986), 203-04:

[W]e sat in the Great Hall and listened to The Mikado played, much too slowly, on the gramophone. The P.M. said it brought back “the Victorian era, eighty years which will rank in our island history with the Antonine Age.” Now, however, “the shadows of victory” were upon us. In 1940 the issue was clear and he could see distinctly what was to be done. But when [Air Marshal] Harris had finished his destruction of Germany, “What will lie between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover?”

Perhaps, however, the Russians would not want to sweep on to the Atlantic, or something might stop them, as the accident of Genghis Khan’s death had stopped the horsed archers of the Mongols, who retired and never came back. Harris: “You mean now they will come back?” Churchill: “Who can say? They may not want to. But there is an unspoken fear in many people’s hearts.”

1947
Later Churchill wrote of a fancied encounter with the ghost of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. Entitled “The Dream,” it recounts their conversation about the years since his father’s death in 1895. Now it was 1947, and Winston says:

Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands. They are Communists now, you know—Karl Marx and all that. It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near. A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal civilisation against the Mongol hordes. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.

No—never despair, he always said. But the historical image of Genghis Khan was still on his mind.

1955
In autumn 1955, after Churchill had retired as Prime Minister, he and his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, dined together for seventeen evenings. Those encounters were fascinating, Anthony wrote. “All sorts of curious pieces of information came out….

Concerning 1940, I played the Devil’s Advocate. Leaving aside the appalling issue of the extermination camps, which was then not evident, would it have been better if we had joined the New Order, as a substantial part of France was then inclined to do?… Hitler most certainly would have attacked Russia and, unharassed in the West, almost certainly would have won. Would the equally monstrous tyranny of the Nazi regime have been mitigated or abbreviated by British influence? Hitler had always respected Britain. Would we have kept our Empire and our financial strength?

Churchill’s reply was brief:

You’re only saying that to be provocative. You know very well we couldn’t have made peace on the heels of a terrible defeat. The country wouldn’t have stood for it. And what makes you think that we could have trusted Hitler’s word—particularly as he could have had Russian resources behind him? At best we would have been a German client state, and there’s not much in that.

This I think summarizes Churchill’s consistent view of the West’s two great antagonists of his era. Significantly, he always kept open the prospect of what he called “a settlement” with the Russians—particularly after Stalin’s death. He never entertained the notion of settlement talks with Hitler.

Further reading
“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

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5 thoughts on “Not Churchill, re Germany: “We butchered the wrong pig””
Richard Kennard says:
17 September 2023 at 18:18
Hello, thank you for posting my reply from 11 March 2023. You are absolutely correct in saying the text does not quote what Churchill actually said. But you must admit that his sentiments come perilously close to “we butchered the wrong pig.” Albeit a brief and regrettable attitude, possibly derived from the great amount of stress of the situation. Is it possible the quote was attributed to Mr. Churchill by a politician or reporter after reading this very report?
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None that I can find. I can only attest to what he actually said, not his innermost thoughts. I have appended to my article his words to Anthony Montague Browne’s poser in 1955: “There’s not much in that.” There is no indication, let alone quotation, suggesting that he ever doubted the wisdom of fighting Hitler to the finish. -RML

Richard Kennard says:
6 August 2023 at 20:34
“I said that frankly, as I had listened to him inveigh so violently against the threat of Soviet domination and the spread of Communism in Europe, and disclose such a lack of confidence in the professions of good faith in Soviet leadership, I had wondered whether he, the Prime Minister, was now willing to declare to the world that he and Britain had made a mistake in not supporting Hitler, for as I understood him, he was now expressing the doctrine which Hitler and Goebbels had been proclaiming and reiterating for the past four years in an effort to break up allied unity and “divide and conquer.” Exactly the same conditions which he described and the same deductions were drawn from them as he now appeared to assert.”
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The writer, Joseph E. Davies, former Ambassador to the USSR, does not quote Churchill as saying “we slaughtered the wrong pig,” the subject of this post. For Davies’ full letter, to President Truman (12 June 1945) including Churchill’s alleged response, see Foreign Relations of the United States, Potsdam Conference I: 33.(Warning, Davies was not economical with words.) Critics of Churchill from both Left and Right often asserted that Churchill believed this, which oversimplifies his true views. Of Davies in particular, we need to understand why he wrote as he did. (Start with a look at his Wikipedia entry. For Churchill's reply when his Private Secretary (playing Devil’s Advocate) voiced a similar question, see "1955" above. -RML

Kenneth Ingle says:
11 March 2022 at 12:45
I was a school child in Hove at the end of WW2, but can remember well, that Churchill was said to have spoken these words! I was therefore more than surprised and astonished recently to hear claims that he had not done so.
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Diligent research cannot turn up one attribution of the quote. Of course it’s always possible, but one would think something that noteworthy would at least have a press notice. —RML

Tom Hart says:
5 January 2022 at 10:05
Apparently it’s in The New Statesman and Nation, volume 35, page 373, dated 28th August 1948; it was said, “supposedly”, on a tour of bombed-out German cities.
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Thanks, do you have the specific wording? He was not in Germany in 1948 though he was at the Congress of Europe at The Hague, and he did see lots of damage in 1945. The thought is not out of line with his thinking circa 1948, but to substantiate it as genuine, we need a primary source or at least a reliable secondary attribution. -RML

Marc Demers says:
20 December 2021 at 18:10
I beg to differ…The quote seemingly comes from his book The Second World War, per YouTube.
=
Seemingly? “Should Germany merchandise again”….”We will force this war upon Hitler”….”Germany’s unforgivable crime”….etc. is simply not among his 20 million published words, all of which the Churchill Project has scanned. People can invent quotes all day long. If one wants to be taken seriously they need to show us attribution, book, edition and pagination. It is not in his war memoirs, nor anywhere else. RML