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“THE
GREATEST EXHILARATION OF ALL”
Churchill asked Jones to explain what it all meant. "For twenty minutes or more he spoke in quiet tones, unrolling his chain of circumstantial evidence, the like of which for its convincing fascination was never surpassed by tales of Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Lecoq." For a moment lines from the Ingoldsby Legends came to the old man:
The poem flashed by, because after hearing him out Churchill quizzed the young man, who made the case that the Germans were using radio beams to find their way to their targets. The others present, eminent scientists and marshals of the Royal Air Force, doubted his evidence — the physics was too difficult, and after all British pilots were trained to navigate by the stars, and found their targets very reliably that way — or so they believed, until the evidence proved otherwise. Jones stood his ground and made the case for the beams. Churchill probed. What could be done? Could the existence of the beams be verified? Could aerial mines be sowed along their path? Could they be deceived or jammed? Jones replied to the direct questioning. He was, he later recalled, filled with the elation of a young man at being noticed by any prime minister, but somehow it was much more. It was the same whenever we met in the war — I had the feeling of being recharged by contact with a source of living power. Here was strength, resolution, humor, readiness to listen, to ask the searching question and, when convinced, to act. He was rarely complimentary at the time, handsome though his compliments could be afterwards, for he had been brought up in sterner days. In 1940 it was compliment enough to be called in by him at the crisis; but to stand up to his questioning attack and then to convince him was the greatest exhilaration of all. As for Churchill, "Being master, and not having to argue too much, once I was convinced about the principles of this queer and deadly game, I gave all the necessary orders that very day in June for the existence of the beam to be assumed, and for all counter-measures to receive absolute priority. The slightest reluctance or deviation in carrying out this policy was to be reported to me." In short order, by a combination of jamming and deception, the British deprived knickebein of most of its usefulness.
"There are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill — whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man." Judged by historian G. R. Elton's standards, many contemporary historians fail. For the last several decades Churchill's war leadership has come under increasingly severe attack, culminating in John Charmley's savage biography of him. Actually, the current spate of criticism represents merely the latest of several waves of postwar attacks on Churchill as warlord. The first surge of criticism came primarily from military authors, and in particular from Churchill's own chairman of the Chiefs of Staff and Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke. The publication of portions of his diaries in the late 1950s shocked readers, who discovered in entries that Brooke himself later described as "liverish" that all had not gone smoothly between Churchill and his generals. In fact, Brooke had withheld some of the more pointed criticisms of the prime minister, which he often wrote after late-night arguments with Churchill. If anything, his anger at the prime minister grew as the war went on. On 10 September 1944 Brooke wrote in his diary (in an entry not present in the first, published version):
Brooke was not alone. Others expressed themselves in more temperate language but had, one suspects, opinions no less severe. One chronically jaundiced military adviser quoted approvingly Robert Menzies, Australia's prime minister early in World War II: "Only Churchill's magnificent and courageous leadership compensated for his deplorable strategic sense." As the war went on their discontent with their political master seems, if anything, to have grown. At the end of the war in Europe, General Hastings Ismay recalled a decade later, Churchill hosted a victory celebration for the chiefs of staff at 10 Downing Street. The prime minister "handed out extravagant praise to the three Chiefs of Staff as having been the architects of victory. Not one of them responded by saying that Winston had also had a little to do with it." Many of the field marshals and admirals of World War II came away nursing the bruises that inevitably came their way in dealing with Churchill. They deplored his excessive interest in what struck them as properly military detail; they feared his imagination and its restless probing for new courses of action. For them, as for some historians who have sympathized with their point of view, Churchill's greatest flaw as warlord was that he meddled, incurably and unforgivably, in the professional affairs of his military advisers. "The prime minister had no understanding of operational details, nor of logistic constraints and opportunities; but he had a great passion for them. He pestered commanders in the field for information and bombarded them with exhortations which went well beyond his responsibilities." A second wave of criticism comes from those who have pored over the documents at some distance from the actual events. Thus David Reynolds writes of Britain's "decision" (his quotes) to fight on in 1940 as "right policy, wrong reasons." Writing of Churchill elsewhere as "a romantic militarist," Reynolds deplores with mock pathos the fate of "young whippersnappers who have the temerity to read the documents and then ask awkward questions!" Other historians have had less resort to humor. Churchill was "seldom consistent and was easily carried away." Small wonder, then, that "the conduct of war emerged, not from any one 'grand plan' or strategy, but out of a series of conflicting and changing views, misunderstandings, personal interests and confusions." In the end, in this view Churchill, "like all men, however great, was powerless to alter the great decisions of history." Thus, for the new historians Churchill's sins have to do less with bullying and meddling — few late-20th-century scholars are inclined to carry a brief for generals — than with lack of foresight or inability to bring any plan to fruition. When Churchill was right, it was for the wrong reasons; if he changed his mind, and he did so frequently, it was a sign of febrile instability; if he described the strategic position to the Allies in compelling prose, it was a sham that covered up chaotic forces that he had neither the wisdom nor the fixity of purpose to master. Thus we have another indictment, no less severe than that of the generals: Churchill failed as a strategist because he did not devise a coherent strategy for the war. Perhaps no one can, some of these historians might argue; in that case, Churchill deserves removal from his pedestal because he misled his contemporaries and at least one succeeding generation into believing otherwise. Even at his best, contemporary historians frequently contend, Churchill did no better than would any other statesman in his place. Churchill devoted an enormous amount of attention, for example, to his personal relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which he regarded as central to the Anglo-American alliance, and with it, to victory. Historian Warren Kimball, however, dismisses the importance of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship. "Had it been Neville Chamberlain and Wendell Willkie — a plausible prospect — wartime relations between the two nations would not have been fundamentally different." One may sympathize with both groups of critics. The generals, after all, suffered the indignities of working with a man who kept them up late night after night, while hounding them with questions of detail. Even less forgivable, one suspects, were such barbs as his remark about confronting, in the person of his Chief of the Imperial General Staff, "the dead hand of inanition," or his observation, on watching the chiefs of staff file out of a meeting. "I have to wage modern war with ancient weapons." Strolling past a new bombproof shelter at the Admiralty he is reported to have remarked, "They have put up a very strong place there — masses of concrete and tons of steel. Taking into account the fact that their heads are solid bone, they ought to be quite safe inside." Bearing the responsibilities they shouldered, knowing better than anyone else the strains suffered by a force all too often fighting at a disadvantage, small wonder that they seethed with discontent. Nor did Churchill's work habits make their lives any easier. Working to a military routine they had to rise early, but serving a master who transacted much business after a late dinner they often had to stay up until the small hours of the morning. Surrounding their caustic and aggressive master were a host of odd characters: acerbic professors like Frederick Lindemann, piratical politicians like Max Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken, and maverick soldiers like Orde Wingate of Burma fame or Percy Hobart, a pioneering tank general reinstated to active duty after Churchill found him languishing as a corporal in the Home Guard. It was Hobart's recall to service that prompted Churchill's remark to Field Marshall Dill, who opposed the move, "It isn't only the good boys who help to win the wars; it is the sneaks and the stinkers as well." To this a modern British officer, pledged to resurrect Dill's reputation and reflecting nearly fifty years after the event the wounded feelings of that decent but limited man:
The historians as well have some excuse for their impatience. The stifling weight of pro-Churchill orthodoxy that dominated not only historiography but public opinion for decades after the Second World War eventually provoked a reaction from the academics, who are naturally skeptical of political leaders. Churchill's own World War II memoirs, appearing shortly after the war and bolstered by large quantities of official documents, held the field for many years in shaping popular as well as scholarly understanding of the war. Here too was a source of discontent for professional students of the past, who by both training and temperament look askance at the self-serving accounts of political leaders, and who rebel automatically against conventional wisdom and pat interpretations of great events. Moreover, some of them are deeply suspicious of the vivid and generally favorable accounts of those politicians, officers, and civil servants who worked most intimately with Churchill and maintained an unaccountably high regard for him — "an exclusive, close-knit, troglodytic group," as Alex Danchev calls them. All the more irritating to many professional historians have been the political leaders of our own day who have declared their reverence for Churchill. Churchill's popularity with the likes of conservative politicians such as Dan Quayle, Caspar Weinberger, or Margaret Thatcher has not improved his standing with professors on either side of the Atlantic. A popular icon as much as an historical figure, Churchill excites the kind of intense admiration in narrow circles usually reserved for sports stars in broader ones. The existence of an International Churchill Society (complete with annual conferences, a glossy magazine, and a souvenir shop selling "Action This Day" stickers) embodies the kind of hero worship that most historians instinctively reject — this is all the more upsetting in view of Churchill's indubitably checkered career. Even as sympathetic a historian as Michael Howard remarks that "the problem for the historian" is "how it was that a man with so unpromising a background and so disastrous a track record could emerge in 1940 as the savior of his country." The generals may have suffered from their excessive closeness to a man who made excruciating demands upon their energies, time, and patience. The dons may have let the temptations of the donnish life, which rewards swipes at historical orthodoxy and deprecates the Great Man theory of history, get the better of them. Both groups were abetted by murmurs of dissent from within Churchill's camp. Of these none was more important than the diary/memoir of Churchill's personal physician, Lord Moran, who described the ailments that began to affect the prime minister during World War II. (Another member of Churchill's inner circle cuttingly remarked of Moran, "He was not, of course, present when discussions of political and military importance took place; but he was often invited to luncheon afterwards.") The legend of a Churchill debilitated by heart ailments and exhaustion, woozy with liquor and showing the signs of early senility still persists, although the truth seems to be that he survived the stresses of the war in far better physical condition and with greater mental acuity than younger political leaders and general officers. Churchill's critics, both contemporary and subsequent, hold a common view of the central flaw in his makeup as a statesman: instability. In their view he was the creature of his enthusiasms, a genius, to be sure, but a whimsical and erratic fantasist. His passion for the Dardanelles expedition of 1915, his quixotic defense of Edward VIII (later made duke of Windsor), his imperialist opposition to Indian independence, his relentless pursuit of strategic dead ends in World War II — including an invasion of Norway early in the war and a lunge for Vienna through the Ljubljana gap at its end — display a lack of political and military sobriety dismaying in a head of state. His odd working hours and exuberant life style (including his reputed taste for Chablis with breakfast and his consumption of whisky throughout working hours), his love of uniforms and his hounding of military subordinates about tactical and technical details well beyond his purview (proposals for antiaircraft defenses based on rockets rather than guns, for example, or his minute proposals for artificial harbors to be installed on the French coast immediately following an invasion) seem to reinforce these views. In this light, and increasingly to modern students of Churchill, he appears a brilliant orator but one whose reactionary views and wild imagination, whose incessant meddling and irrational enthusiasms made him as much a menace as a source of salvation to a beleaguered Britain. Indeed, it is fair to say that this is now very much the scholarly view of Churchill. — This is the first in a series of excerpts on Winston Churchill from Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. Copyright (c) 2002 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by Permission of The Free Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. |
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