Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45
By Max Hastings
Harper Press, 664pp
Michael Burleigh, The Telegraph...UK...9/13/09
Churchill is so integral to Britain’s national mythology that it is a brave man who casts an affectionately realistic light not only on his character, but on his achievements during the Second World War. While insisting that Churchill was 'the greatest actor upon the stage of affairs whom the world has ever known’, Max Hastings has written a subtly revisionist account of Britain’s wartime premier, chiefly by viewing Churchill through the eyes of others.
This enables him to resist the pull of Churchill’s own narrative histories, which were written without the aid of a diary of the sort that others used to record their shifting reactions to him. It also provides a much fresher account of Churchill at work – for there was precious little rest – than those which rely on the usual anecdotes about dictation from the bath, dragon-infested silk dressing gowns, and battles for bed space with Nelson the cat. That Hastings is never seduced by Churchill’s effortless apophthegms and anecdotes is one indication that this is a really fine book rather than simply an addition to the hagiography.
Churchill’s life story is familiar enough. In its existential crisis of 1940, Britain turned to a romantic Victorian Tory imperialist, with a unique aptitude for capturing, or shaping, the national mood with powerful rhetoric in part derived from the illustrated histories familiar to children and recalled snatches of the Bible. In contrast to many among Britain’s ruling elite, notably an aristocracy of whom Hastings takes a bleak view, Churchill was never prepared to countenance any shady deals with a foe he regarded as fathomlessly evil.
During the period in which Britain fought almost alone – the Dominions being the exception – Churchill parsed what amounted to a series of defeats and evacuations as noble encounters, even as he desperately waited for the American intervention, albeit at a price they collected with compound interest. In the event he got the mixed moral blessing of Soviet intervention six months earlier. Vast Axis and Soviet armies slugged it out, while the British made various peripheral interventions, in which they mainly managed to defeat Italians. Whereas the Russians had to deal with 200 Axis divisions, the British struggled to handle the couple deployed as the Afrika Korps. Churchill was so intensely frustrated by the caution and lack of imagination of his generals – notably those who had won VCs in the First World War – that he tried to fight his own war of commando raids, failing to get his way over landings in Norway, and getting it with disastrous effect in 1943 in the Dodecanese, which Hastings calls 'a triumph of impulse over reason that should never have taken place’. The Second World War required more than a cavalry officer’s anachronistic dash.
Hastings’s brilliant book is also a quietly damning indictment of Britain’s culture of war-making, whether of making do with shoddy equipment – corruption in procurement was as evident then as now – or appointments and promotions based on mere social slickness. Hastings overturns a cartload of national shibboleths, including an undeserved credulity towards the British Army, most of whose generals were not bright and lacked the killer instincts of their German or Japanese equivalents. Among them was Alexander, for whose Guardsman’s charm Churchill too easily and persistently fell.
Hastings is also sceptical about the romantic enthusiasm for resistors, secret agents and spies – excepting perhaps those from Cambridge – who kept Stalin abreast of every major development in the Anglo-American alliance. Echoing the view of Bomber Command’s Arthur Harris, Hastings believes that the SOE, and every resistance movement beyond Yugoslavia, were of no strategic significance, regardless of their subsequent necessity to various national mythologies. He is also dismissive of the German resistance to Hitler, many of whose aims were only marginally less objectionable than those of the Nazis. On several occasions Hastings praises the role of the Navy, which kept millions of tons of supplies rolling in, as well as the RAF, which relentlessly pounded German cities into rubble. He is rightly sceptical about whether the RAF (as distinct from the Red Army air force) could have done anything to decelerate the Holocaust. Contrary to the view of a famous Low cartoon that shows the British people with their sleeves rolled up behind their purposive leader, there was, following successive misjudgments, mounting clamour to deprive Churchill of the Ministry of Defence, while strikes were endemic among men who earned 10 or 20 times the wage of an infantryman.
The country’s international position seemed to shadow the waning physical powers of a leader whose capacity for the discomforts of air and sea travel was awesome. Whereas Churchill began the war as the dominant figure among the big three, by 1943-44 the bland and enigmatic Roosevelt regarded him as a bore, while after several years of near contempt regarding the absent second front, Stalin humoured him even as his own legions steamrollered their way across Europe. While Churchill flew off to Athens to mediate in the internecine squabbles of the Greeks, a subject Hastings treats with much authority, they arranged the future of the world.
Doubtless this remarkable book will irritate those who like their history sealed and dusted, or worse, cite Churchill for mere political advantage. At a time when our politicians are mismanaging a foreign war, it has many invaluable lessons, not just about leadership, but about the relationship between soldiers and civil society, which range far beyond the period Hastings nominally addresses. In that respect this is a timely as well as a judicious and important book
