There have already been some 1,633 books written about Winston Churchill, or
so Walter Reid tells us in his new book Churchill 1940–45. He makes no
apologies for writing another, and he doesn’t need to: Churchill was so
remarkable a figure that he would have deserved quite a number even if he
had not survived to lead his country through the Second World War; and the
odds against his surviving were steep. Carlo D’Este, in his new contribution
(the 1,635th?), reminds us how the young Churchill deliberately courted
danger; partly because he enjoyed it, but even more because he saw a
chestful of medals as the best possible introduction to the world of
politics. He told his mother, he was “so conceited that [he] could not
believe that the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so
prosaic an ending”. The world would be a very different place if they had.
Still, the Churchill story has now been told so often that aspiring
biographers need to find something fresh to say if they are to find
publishers, and their publishers find readers. Walter Reid’s main object is
to show that “the idea of a country united behind the Prime Minister is a
retrospective myth”. Apart from a very few weeks in the summer of 1940, he
reminds us, Churchill had to fight every inch of the way to impose his will:
on a Conservative Party that disliked and mistrusted him, on a restive House
of Commons, on his recalcitrant military advisers, and finally on his allies
– not only the obstreperous General de Gaulle but a United States that did
not consider “the relationship” as nearly so special as Churchill himself
tried to pretend.
There is nothing very new here. Most of Churchill’s biographers have described
his problems with his generals and his allies at considerable length, while
the problems presented by what he called “the snarlers and nagglers” in the
House of Commons did not indicate any real depth of feeling in the country
as a whole. But Reid does well to remind us of the very thin gruel on which
the British public had to be fed during the war years. Wavell’s short-lived
victories in the Western Desert in 1940–41 barely interrupted a litany of
disasters that opened with the fiasco in Norway that paradoxically brought
Churchill, its chief architect, into power; continued through the defeats in
Greece, Crete and the Western Desert up to the fall of Singapore, and beyond
that to the disaster at Dieppe and ultimate humiliation with the fall of
Tobruk. The remarkable thing was not that public opinion became restive, but
that Churchill was able to hold it together at all.
As for the Allies, the story Reid has to tell about de Gaulle (“the cross of
Lorraine”, as Churchill sighed, “the heaviest I have to bear”) is also
familiar. Less so is that of relations with the United States, and he does
well to remind us how difficult these were. The myth of the “special
relationship” that Churchill invented and that so many of his admirers on
both sides of the Atlantic continue to propagate is briskly demolished. A
remarkable rapport did indeed develop between Churchill and President
Roosevelt, but it did not extend to their military advisers; while Congress,
the State Department and the US Treasury continued to regard the British and
all they stood for with a suspicion verging on hostility. As Carlo D’Este
points out in Warlord, “had the Second World War not erupted, Britain and
the United States would never have been allies”. Throughout the war the
United States consulted her own interests, as any state is bound to do: and
these did not extend to helping Britain either to remain solvent or to
retain any part of her empire once the war was over.
Roosevelt’s personal bonhomie was based on a shrewd appreciation that Britain
must not be allowed to lose the war, and then – once the Americans had been
precipitated out of a neutrality they would far rather have preserved – that
she must be humoured until the United States was strong enough to take over
the direction of the war and wage it as she thought fit. He needed
Churchill’s help to overcome the visceral dislike of the British that
penetrated deep into his military and political elites. Ironically,
Churchill was to do this so successfully that today he is far more of an
iconic figure in the United States than Roosevelt.
When it comes to Churchill’s actual conduct of the war, we enter more stormy
waters, and it is on this that Carlo D’Este concentrates in Warlord. His
avowed purpose is to conduct “an objective, total examination of his life as
a military leader”, from Churchill’s early years as a subaltern on the
North-West Frontier until the Second World War. This was in fact done,
briefly and elegantly, by the British historian Geoffrey Best in his book
Churchill and War some four years ago; but D’Este’s work – 800 pages of text
with a further hundred of notes and bibliography – is an altogether more
massive affair. It is clearly a labour of love, and its range, detail and
narrative skill are formidable. For those who know nothing of Churchill’s
life and work it will provide a comprehensive and readable survey. But for
those who already have a working knowledge it covers a great deal of very
familiar ground, not all of which is strictly relevant to his theme.
Indeed, once he strays from his own special ground, D’Este’s historical grasp
is rather uncertain. To pick a few nits: the British expedition to Egypt in
1882 was not intended to forestall a French initiative: it started off as a
joint venture from which the French pulled out at the last moment. Hilaire
Belloc’s famous verse about the Maxim Gun had nothing to do with the Battle
of Omdurman. The description of Kitchener as “a superb organizer” hardly
fits his performance at the War Office, where he destroyed such organization
as existed without replacing it with anything workable. On the First World
War, although much can be said in dispraise of Haig, it is not the case that
he “never changed his unsuccessful strategy of employing infantry and
artillery in massive and costly attacks”; nor can it be said that the BEF
“never recovered from Passchendaele”. In 1918 Haig was to employ a revived
and vigorous BEF in a series of skilfully combined attacks by infantry,
artillery, tanks and low-flying aircraft that brought the German armies to
the verge of total defeat. Since Churchill himself, as Minister for
Munitions, was deeply involved in the procurement and preparation if not the
actual planning of this campaign, the omission of any mention of it in so
comprehensive a biography is distinctly odd.
Walter Reid, on the other hand, rightly stresses the importance of Churchill’s
stint at the Ministry of Munitions, and the experience it gave him in
mobilizing the resources of the nation for total war. He also makes the
all-important point that Churchill’s long experience in Whitehall, where he
had served in virtually all the great offices of state, gave him a grasp of
the business of government greater than that of any of his contemporaries.
Carlo D’Este says quite rightly that “the presence in the government of . .
. an adventurer and soldier of fortune . . . was precisely what Britain
required as its leader”; but it was a soldier of fortune whose experience in
government was second to none.
But how far was Churchill’s background as “an adventurer and soldier of
fortune” a qualification for conducting the war? Temperamentally, it clearly
gave him a great advantage. He actually enjoyed war, and never made any
bones about it. Otherwise he could never have inspired the British people in
the way that he did. His pugnacity made him plan to take the offensive from
the moment that he came into office, and to harry his military advisers
until they did. Further, his experience as a professional soldier (not only
at Omdurman but on the Western Front in 1915) made him understand, or
believe that he understood at least as well as his professional advisers,
what war was like at “the sharp end”. Reid attributes the resistance he
encountered from the military to professional lethargy, but he himself seems
to share many of Churchill’s own illusions. “If OVERLORD had been
supplemented by attacks from Scandinavia and the southern French Atlantic
coast” he suggests, “or by ‘rolling up’ Europe from the South-East and
joining hands with the Russians, as Churchill advocated . . . the war would
not have concluded with a massive thrust on a single front.” Indeed it
wouldn’t. It would probably have ended with the Russians on the Rhine.
For the trouble with Churchill was that he never understood logistics – the
operational art of how to get there, as the American general put it,
“fustest with the mostest men”. It has been well said that amateurs do
strategy but professionals do logistics, and Churchill certainly did
strategy very well. As Reid says, it was he who “developed the strategy that
won the war”: that is, to focus on Germany first, to defend the Middle East,
to hold the ring around the Axis powers until the Allies were strong enough
to attack, and then assault at a moment and point of their own choosing. In
implementing that strategy, Reid points out, Churchill “favoured
opportunities that could be exploited rather than allowing logistics to
dictate”. Unfortunately, although strategy may propose, it is logistics that
ultimately disposes; to say nothing of such minor details as first obtaining
command of the sea and of the air.
Carlo D’Este, a professional soldier, understands this very well, and his
analysis of Churchill’s strengths and weaknesses as a “Warlord” is
excellent. I do not entirely agree with his analysis of the so-called
“Mediterranean Strategy”, though to explain why would be to extend far
beyond the legitimate bounds of a review. But let me end with a rather
dogmatic statement. The root of the differences between the American and
British Chiefs of Staff over where and when to attack “Fortress Europe” was
based less on their military philosophies or national perceptions than on a
simple historical fact. In 1942 the British Army had experienced fighting
the Wehrmacht in insufficient numbers and without command of the air, and
the Americans had not. Its leaders knew that only when these conditions had
been reversed could they fight with any hope of success. The most
imaginative of strategies, and the most impeccable of logistics, could do
little to help if the army, once committed to battle, was regularly and
soundly trounced by a very much better opponent; which, although it is not
fashionable to say so, the Germans most certainly were. That was why the
British Chiefs of Staff, led by the redoubtable Alan Brooke, opposed the
strategic concepts both of Churchill and, initially, their American opposite
numbers. That was why they fought in the Mediterranean, where they could and
did gradually obtain the upper hand in initially small-scale operations, and
where the Americans themselves would learn from painful experience to see
the point. Whenever Churchill himself was in a position to direct military
operations, as he was at Anzio or in the Aegean, the result was disaster.
Carlo D’Este’s conclusion is irresistible: the temperament and experience of
“a soldier of fortune”, inspiring though it might be for a people in arms,
was not in itself sufficient qualification for the conduct of
twentieth-century war.
Carlo D’Este
WARLORD
Churchill at war, 1874–1945
936pp. Penguin. £30.
978 0 713 99753 8
US: HarperCollins. $39.95.
978 0 06 057573 1
Walter Reid
CHURCHILL 1940–45
Under friendly fire
402pp. Berlinn. £25 (US $51.50).
978 1 84341 044 7
Michael Howard’s recent books include his autobiography Captain
Professor: A life in war and peace, 2006, The First World War: A very short
introduction, 2007, and Liberation or Catastrophe?: Reflections on the
history of the twentieth century, 2007. An updated version of his book War
in European History appeared earlier this year.
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