David Irving - Early Life

Early Life

Irving and his twin brother were born in Hutton, near Brentwood, Essex, England. His father, John James Cawdell Irving, was a commander in the Royal Navy, and his mother, Beryl, an illustrator. Irving's twin brother Nicholas Irving has said that "David used to run toward bombed out houses shouting heil Hitler", a statement which Irving repudiates and says is "untrue."

During the Second World War, Irving's father was an officer aboard the light cruiser HMS Edinburgh. On 2 May 1942, while escorting Convoy QP-11 in the Barents Sea, the ship was sunk by the German U-boat U-456. Irving's father survived, but severed all links with his wife and their children after the incident. Irving described his childhood in an interview with the American writer Ron Rosenbaum as: "Unlike the Americans, we English suffered great deprivations...we went through childhood with no toys. We had no kind of childhood at all. We were living on an island that was crowded with other people's armies". Irving went on to claim to Rosenbaum that his negationist views about World War II dated to his childhood, particularly due to his objections to the way Adolf Hitler was portrayed in the British media during the war. Irving asserted that his "sceptical" views about the Third Reich were due to his doubts about the cartoonist caricatures of Hitler and the other Nazi leaders that appeared in the British press during the war. According to his twin, Nicholas, David has been a provocateur and prankster since his youth.