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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part two in a week-long series of excerpts from Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. Click here for the first installment.
Churchill's appetite for information included a shrewd ability to ensure its delivery to him in usable form. He turned to "the Prof," Professor Frederick Lindemann of Oxford (later Lord Cherwell), who had the outstanding gift of being able to explain briefly and lucidly some of the chief technical issues associated with modern warfare — an invaluable service for a chief who had an abiding interest in technology but no background in science. The Prof, moreover, ran a small statistical office that prepared accurate and comprehensible charts and tables for the prime minister, enabling him to retain a good picture of those aspects of the war (especially the battle of the Atlantic) which could only be measured and judged in this way, rather than by the movement of battle lines. The Prof's data often served the prime minister better than did the more tendentious presentations prepared by various departments of the government. And the Prof provided an independent — occasionally misguided, but nonetheless useful — source of military analysis. It was, for example, Lindemann who first suspected in 1941 that Bomber Command had had far less success in hitting its targets than it claimed, prompting Churchill to launch a series of studies and reforms that led to a far more capable Royal Air Force by 1944. System, not whim, dominated Churchill's government machinery. His immediate staff throughout the war consisted primarily of men who had worked for and admired his predecessor Neville Chamberlain. His strict injunction to conduct business in writing ("Let it be very clearly understood that all directions from me are made in writing, or should be immediately afterwards confirmed in writing, and that I do not accept any responsibility for matters relating to national defence on which I am alleged to have given decisions, unless they are recorded in writing") stands in remarkable contrast to the work habits of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin, all of whom relied chiefly on the spoken word, with all its increased possibilities for ambiguity and misinterpretation. At his orders, a small but diligent staff followed up the blizzard of memoranda that issued from his office, making sure that orders were followed, questions answered, and data assembled. Of orders, however, there were actually very few, particularly in military matters, as we shall see. Moreover, throughout the war Churchill relied on his staff to maintain a smoothly working machinery of war direction. General Sir Hastings Ismay, the secretary to the Chiefs of Staff, served as the indispensable link between the irascible prime minister and his harried chieftains. As Ismay later described his role: "I felt that my job was to interpret, repeat to interpret, the prime minister to the Chiefs of Staff, and the Chiefs of Staff to the prime minister." This task he performed superbly. One suspects that in his absence the undeniable rancor between Churchill and the chiefs might have exploded disastrously. Indeed, Ismay recalled in 1964 that in advance of the second Quebec summit the Chiefs of Staff were on the verge of a collective resignation. Ismay "stepped into the breach" and formally resigned, only to have the resignation ripped up and relations at least temporarily restored. Churchill's work habits reveal far more order and discipline than is commonly thought; the same holds true for the zigs and zags of his policymaking. In an historical work, Churchill wrote of the first duke of Marlborough's contemporary, Lord Halifax, that "a love of moderation and a sense of the practical seemed in him to emerge in bold rather than tepid courses. He could strike as hard for compromise as most leaders for victory." Whether or not this description accurately captured the 18th-century statesman, it surely did his 20th-century student. I thought we ought to have conquered the Irish and then given them Home Rule: that we ought to have starved out the Germans, and then revictualled their country; and that after smashing the General Strike we should have met the grievances of the miners. I always get into trouble because so few people take this line. . . . It is all the fault of the human brain being made in two lobes, only one of which does any thinking, so that we are all right-handed or left-handed; whereas if we were properly constructed we should use our right and left hands with equal force and skill according to circumstances. As it is, those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace, and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war. This was a theme to which Churchill gave attention on more than one occasion. To understand history the reader must always remember how small is the proportion of what is recorded to what actually took place, and above all how severely the time factor is compressed. Years pass with chapters and sometimes with pages, and the tale abruptly reaches new situations, changed relationships, and different atmospheres. Thus the figures of the past are insensibly portrayed as more fickle, more harlequin, and less natural in their actions than they really were. Churchill brought to the Second World War an exceedingly rich knowledge, direct as well as vicarious, of military affairs. Indeed, unique among statesmen, he experienced many of the great wars of his lifetime twice — once in reality, a second time in study, as he reflected upon their structure and meaning. During his early career as a junior officer and newspaper correspondent (roles that he combined, to the distress of his superiors) he saw combat on several continents — in India, Cuba, the Sudan, and South Africa. Some historians have suggested that these colonial campaigns gave him a romantic picture of war. Had he not taken part in, and subsequently described with obvious relish and exuberance, one of the last great and successful cavalry charges, at the battle of Omdurman in 1898? And did he not write, in retrospect, that "there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result"? In truth, however, a closer examination of both the published work and the private letters even from this period of his career reveals a far more sober and penetrating student of war. In his one-volume book The River War, for example, he pays eloquent tribute to the importance of the Anglo-Egyptian force's lines of communications, and to the remarkable feats of transport and supply that were crucial to Lord Kitchener's campaign up the Nile. Victory is the beautiful, bright-colored flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed. Yet even the military student, in his zeal to master the fascinating combinations of the actual conflict, often forgets the far more intricate complications of supply. Making good this rhetorical flourish, Churchill proceeded to devote an entire chapter to a meticulous and lucid account of the complicated logistics of Kitchener's operations. In these conflicts, of course, Churchill was a junior participant, his writings still those of a promising young man. In the years leading up to the First World War he was a leading figure, serving as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, taking a brief turn in the trenches, and then returning to public office as minister of munitions and later secretary of state for war. His four-volume work, The World Crisis, although supposedly dismissed by George Bernard Shaw as "a memoir masquerading as a history of the cosmos," contains extended reflections on all features of war, including the processes of technological innovation, tactics, and the problem of coalition warfare. His chapter on "The Romance of Design," for example, carries a reader from the problem of gun size on battleships to the larger trade-offs (speed, armor, and firepower) in warship design, to the issue of propulsion, which in turn bore on the momentous decision to change the Royal Navy over from coal to oil as its principal fuel — a seemingly technical decision pregnant with vast political consequences. To those wars that Churchill both fought and lived one must add those that he experienced as an historian only. Of these, the most important were the War of the Spanish Succession, conducted by his ancestor the first duke of Marlborough, and the American Civil War. His biography of Marlborough, again too easily dismissed as a mere apologia for his great ancestor, is best understood not only as history but also as a treatise on statesmanship. It is, in particular, a study of the problem of coalition warfare — and "the history of all coalitions," he told his readers, "is a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies." The American Civil War formed a central feature of Churchill's last major work, his History of the English-speaking Peoples, much of which was composed before the Second World War. He devoted less time and energy to its study than he had to the other conflicts that he examined, but it too informed his understanding of war. When, for example, he recalled the skepticism (substantial in English military circles) about American military potential, he wrote that his firm conviction to the contrary was based at least in part on his knowledge of the Civil War. On more than one occasion in his account of World War II analogies to the American Civil War develop, as they did in his speeches — particularly, of course, those directed to Americans. He reminded Congress in May 1943 that "No one after Gettysburg doubted which way the dread balance of war would incline, yet far more blood was shed after the Union victory at Gettysburg than in all the fighting which went before." In this he saw, quite properly, an analogy with the Allies' circumstances in that watershed year. — This is the second 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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fact, the above impression, common though it be, is false to the core,
for Churchill was a man of system — unorthodox and exuberant system,
but system nonetheless. A shrewd Royal Navy captain, Percy Scott, himself
a pioneer in naval warfare, observed after meeting a 25-year-old Winston
Churchill in 1899, "I am very proud to have met you. . . . I feel
certain that I shall some day shake hands with you as prime minister of
England. You possess the two necessary qualifications, genius and plod."
The plod was no less important than the genius. Churchill, far from being
an aristocratic lounger, was a glutton for work; his motto to his secretaries
during the Second World War was "KBO" — "Keep Buggering
On." Only disciplined work habits allowed him to pursue a crowded
career that included leading positions in politics, a steady stream of
journalistic output, and the writing of at least five multivolume works,
as well as single-volume books of history and personal narrative. His
staff usually consisted of at least one private secretary and three or
more other secretaries, who had to work in relays to keep up with the
blizzard of letters, articles, and books that he dictated to them. His
working hours were, it is true, hard on his subordinates, extending as
they frequently did into the small hours of the morning. But here too
he exhibited not self-indulgence but a regimen that enabled him to handle
a crushing burden of work. Rising at eight, he would read for several
hours in bed — scanning newspapers, intelligence reports, and cables.
Meetings and dictation of minutes would be followed by lunch and then
a nap of an hour or more, allowing him to work on until early morning.
"By this means I was able to press a day and a half's work into one,"
he recalled; he maintained this routine throughout the war. That he enjoyed
leisurely lunches and dinners is true; one must ask, however, whether
this did not show a shrewd understanding of the need for some relaxation
in sociable circumstances from the extraordinary pressures of war. Indeed,
in this respect as in others — for example, his orders not to be
woken up for news save in the most dire circumstances — Churchill
exhibited a wise sense of pacing that allowed him, a man of seventy in
1944, to sustain a program of work and travel that would have killed a
much younger man.
