It seems no great exaggeration to describe Winston Churchill's career as that
of a warrior obliged to participate in politics in order to achieve power to
run Britain's wars. Although by 1914 he had played an energetic role at the
Colonial Office, the Board of Trade and as home secretary, many of his
contemporaries perceived him as a warlord-in-waiting, bursting with
impatience to direct Britain's armies, fleets and embryonic air force. He
made 140 flights at a period when such pioneering was mortally perilous,
before Clementine persuaded him to desist.
As First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911, he probed every detail of naval
affairs with a vigour unmatched by any other peacetime service minister in
history. He belaboured admirals about gunnery, harbour defence, warship
design and, above all, strategy. He perceived most British sailors as
admirable fighting seamen, who made small use of their brains. “We had more
captains of ships than captains of war,” he wrote later.
He attended the manoeuvres of the German, French and British armies in his
uniform as a major of the Oxfordshire Hussars. When war broke out in 1914,
he provoked the derisive laughter of the cabinet by cabling from Antwerp,
asking to be allowed to resign the Admiralty in order to command the city's
defence. From the moment that he became prime minister in May 1940, his
conduct of office was determined by lifelong scepticism about the fitness of
service chiefs to direct the war effort, a role that he appropriated to
himself.
Carlo D'Este is the American author of a series of uncommonly thoughtful and
informed books on the battles and commanders of the second world war,
foremost among them Decision in Normandy, his groundbreaking study of the
1944 campaign. His big new work examines Churchill's many experiences of
conflict. Critics who denounced the bumptious young politician as a
war-lover missed the point that he never wished to inflict the horrors of
the battlefield upon others. But it was undeniable that his own happiest
hours were spent within earshot of gunfire.
His enthusiasm was precocious. In 1889, as a 14-year-old Harrovian, he
composed an essay about an imagined British military campaign in Russia in
1914. It was written in diary form, through the words of an aide to the
commanding general. “Churchill's lifelong romanticism about war was
reflected in this first military paper,” writes D'Este. It described “moving
lines and columns of red surmounted by the glimmering bayonet... enemy
shells bursting in the masses of our cavalry killing and wounding dozens of
them at a time”. This scene, Churchill wrote, was “magnificent”.
Few who met him as a young army officer and war correspondent doubted his
brilliance, but many recoiled from his caddishness and self-promotion. His
early campaign narratives, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, and The
River War, are superbly assured works from a man in his twenties. His
courage under fire was remarkable, though he was never rewarded with the
decorations he craved. Most senior officers, Kitchener notable among them,
deplored the young upstart who criticised commanders with such
condescension.
His former friend Aylmer Haldane bore lasting resentment about the manner of
Churchill's solo escape from Boer captivity in Pretoria in 1899, leaving the
officer behind. Haldane wrote in his journal when My Early Life was
published in 1930, lamenting the fact that the author lacked “the moral
courage to admit that, in the excitement of the moment, he saw a chance of
escape and could not resist the temptation to take advantage of it, not
realising it would compromise the escape of his companions”. Churchill's
behaviour reflected the monumental egoism of his life.
His transition to politics, and to power, made it hard for even field marshals
to ignore his influence or deny his genius. But when disaster befell his
most cherished design, the 1915 Dardanelles campaign, a host of critics were
waiting to celebrate his fall. The Dardanelles reflected a reality that
would become even more prominent in the second world war: the gulf between
Churchill's towering aspirations and the limitations of his nation in
fulfilling them.
In D'Este's comprehensive and balanced study of Churchill's record, it seems
to me that the only missing link is an exploration of the shortcomings of
Britain's army. These explain so much that went wrong, both in 1915 and
1939-45. Churchill, himself a hero, expected others to share his lust for
glory, and to be competent to achieve it.
No military or naval plan is good or bad in isolation. It must be judged in
relation to the forces that carry it out. At the Dardanelles, in Crete, the
western desert, at Anzio and elsewhere in Italy, British (and American)
commanders and troops proved incapable of realising Churchill's grand
visions. His caution about the timing of D-day in Normandy, which so
exasperated the Americans in 1943, reflected his reluctant conversion to a
belief that allied troops could beat the Germans or Japanese only when they
possessed overwhelming superiority.
Churchill forged a deep respect for aircrew during the Battle of Britain,
which for the rest of the war caused him to excuse the RAF from the
harrowing the other services received. He cherished the navy as an
institution, but retained an unjustly poor opinion of most admirals. He
often accused them of reluctance to hazard their ships, when in truth Tovey,
Cunningham and others merely resisted making useless sacrifices, especially
in the face of enemy air power.
He never thought much of the British Army or its commanders, with the unworthy
exception of Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, his beau idéal of a
gentleman warrior. He grudgingly acknowledged Montgomery's serviceability,
but deplored his “bounder” personality. He displayed notable wisdom in
appointing Alan Brooke as head of the army in November 1941, even though
Brooke fought to the last gasp his strategic fantasies, such as amphibious
assaults on north Norway and Sumatra.
Yet the prime minister never showed much personal warmth towards the dour
Ulsterman. “Relations between Churchill and Brooke suffered the longer the
war went on,” says D'Este, “as much from fatigue as from mutual
exasperation... Brooke eventually came to resent playing Churchill's foil...
[he] viewed his role as having evolved from that of consigliere to that of
nanny. What particularly irked him was that, despite Churchill's growing
experience of war, he never evolved as a strategist, instead regressing.”
But D'Este's admiration for Churchill is never in doubt. The defining judgment
on his leadership is that Britain emerged from the second world war among
the victors, which would have been most implausible without him. Whatever
the shortcomings of the machinery of command that he created, it seems a
masterpiece when viewed alongside those of the other allies, and of the
Axis. Anyone who wishes to understand the evolution of Churchill from young
cavalry subaltern to Britain's saviour can do no better than read this
sober, measured and meticulously researched account.
Warlord by Carlo D'Este
Allen Lane £30 pp960
