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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part three in a week-long series of excerpts from Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. Click here for yesterday's installment.
War statesmanship, in Churchill's view, focused at the apex of government an array of considerations and calculations that even those one rung down could not fully fathom. War, he wrote in The World Crisis, "knows no rigid divisions between . . . Allies, between Land, Sea and Air, between gaining victories and alliances, between supplies and fighting men, between propaganda and machinery, which is, in fact, simply the sum of all forces and pressures operative at a given period. . . ." Churchill's profound sense of the uncertainties inherent in war suggests that he would have found the notion that one could produce a blueprint for victory at any time before, say, 1943 an absurdity bred of unfamiliarity with war itself. War is a constant struggle and must be waged from day to day. It is only with some difficulty and within limits that provision can be made for the future. Experience shows that forecasts are usually falsified and preparations always in arrear. Nevertheless, there must be a design and theme for bringing the war to a victorious end in a reasonable period. All the more is this necessary when under modern conditions no large-scale offensive operation can be launched without the preparation of elaborate technical apparatus. Here was a view that he had long held as a result of experience and study. "Every set of assumptions which it is necessary to make, draws new veils of varying density in front of the dark curtain of the future." Churchill's awareness of the ironies of politics and the limits of human foresight was grounded not only in the experience of a long life in public affairs, but in a close study of history. Commenting at the end of his biography of the first duke of Marlborough on the shifting relations between Britain and France over the centuries, he observed soberly that "even the most penetrating gaze reaches only conclusions which, however seemingly vindicated at a given moment, are inexorably effaced by time." Churchill thus struck a middle position between those who would deny any possibility of strategy (as opposed to mere military opportunism, with which he has been charged) and those who would reduce it to a blueprint. In the latter category fell the American military leadership, which bitterly resisted any attempt to deviate from the basic strategy of an invasion of Northwest Europe in 1943. Churchill successfully opposed them, persuading President Roosevelt to adopt first the invasion of North Africa in 1942 and then the follow-up campaigns in Sicily and Italy in 1943. In part because he mistrusted all foresight, including his own, Churchill believed that the formulation of strategy in war did not consist merely in drawing up state documents sketching out a comprehensive view of how the war would be won, but also in a host of detailed activities which, when united and dominated by a central conception, would form a comprehensive picture. This attention to detail stemmed as well from his unwillingness to put full reliance on military expertise. This skepticism, which he did not hide, provoked the deepest resentments in Churchill's lieutenants. They knew that although he might respect them individually for their knowledge, courage, and qualities of leadership, he regarded his military subordinates with no small amount of professional mistrust. Some of this stemmed from his suspicion of bureaucratic processes. "You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together — what do you get? The sum total of their fears!" Hence too his mordant remarks about military staffs, even at one point a suggestion that "The best thing would be to form a Sacred Legion of about one thousand staff officers and let them set an example to the troops in leading some particularly desperate attack." To a degree that is today insufficiently realized, all the high-ranking combatants of the Second World War, at least in its early phases, operated on the basis of personal memories of the First. It is striking indeed how often analogies with World War I experiences crop up in official memoranda and minutes of discussions. In Churchill's case one dominant memory, of course, was of having attempted to force through a strategy, the attack on Turkey via the Dardanelles, which collapsed as a result of what he considered to be insufficient military enthusiasm for the project. Certainly the First World War dominated British thinking about acceptable levels of casualties in major military operations on the Continent — hence Lindemann's 1942 remark to General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the United States Army, as the latter pressed for an early landing on the European Continent, "It's no use — you are arguing against the casualties on the Somme." From Churchill's point of view, however, the most important feature of the First World War was the cold and glaring light it cast on the limitations of senior military leaders. Norman Brook, secretary of the Cabinet under Churchill in the 1950s, wrote to Hastings Ismay, the former secretary to the Chiefs of Staff, a revealing Churchillian observation: "Churchill has said to me, in private in conversation, that this [a more harmonious pattern of civil-military relations than in 1914-1918] was partly due to the extent to which the generals had been discredited in the First War — which meant that, in the Second War, their successors could not pretend to be professionally infallible." Churchill did not share the simple view, common after the First World War, that the top brass had been mere incompetents, callous dullards oblivious to human suffering. Rather, it was that they persisted in a theory of war that could only be conducted at enormous cost. British and French generals "were throughout consistently true to their professional theories, and when in the fifth campaign of the war the facts began for the first time to fit the theories, they reaped their just reward." In his sophisticated if severe criticism of the generals he anticipated the conclusions of historians writing some seventy years later; they had, of course, far greater advantages of time and documentation with which to work. Commanders in chief, Churchill wrote, are, like emperors, surrounded "by smiling and respectful faces" of staffs that "are often prompted to use smooth processes" rather than bring harsh facts to the fore. "The whole habit of mind of a military staff is based on subordination of opinion." If there was one failure in war direction during the First World War, in Churchill's view, it was a fault that he ascribed to the political leadership in dealing with Lord Kitchener, who was secretary of state for war but really, in the first years of the war, a generalissimo in all but name: "The War Council, instead of coming to grips with him and making him come to grips with his problem, mutely and supinely awaited the mysterious workings of his mind." Politicians should make no apologies for putting their military subordinates under severe pressure, because "war is a business of terrible pressures." Churchill expressed his view most directly in a comment deprecating an American proposal in 1943 for appointing a single supreme commander for the war in Northwest Europe. This all looks very simple from a distance and appeals to the American sense of logic. However in practice it is found not sufficient for a government to give a general a directive to beat the enemy and wait to see what happens. The matter is much more complicated. The general may well be below the level of his task, and has often been found so. Churchill, to be sure, admired many military leaders, including some of those whose views he contested bitterly. But at no point was he willing to simply take their judgments on faith — especially not on some of the higher issues of strategy, but not on technical matters either. Nor should he have. The spotlight that today is focused on Churchill's errors of operational and strategic judgment all too often ignores the extent to which these were shared, sometimes with greater enthusiasm, by his professional advisers — such as his exaggeration of the possibilities in Greece in the spring of 1941, or his more dangerous underestimation of Japanese military and naval abilities later in that year, or his exaggeration of the strategic possibilities open in the eastern Mediterranean and Italy in 1944. This selective reading of the record also leaves unilluminated the mistakes, no less grave or frequent, of his professional advisers when they ran counter to Churchill's judgments. At different points, let it be remembered, his senior military leaders were unwilling to run risks at home to save the Mediterranean in 1941, fully expected Russia to collapse in that year (as they did Germany in 1944), underestimated the military potential of the United States in 1942, entertained the gravest reservations about the Normandy operation ("It may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war!" wrote Brooke on June 5 1944), disbelieved in the possibility of strategic bombing of anything other than cities, and refused to concede, as late as 1944, that the day of the battleship had passed. Were their views to come under a scrutiny as severe as that they and others accorded Churchill's, one might well wonder how their reputations would stand up. What would the anti-Churchill historians do, for example, with misjudgments as egregious as that of the chief planners of the British Chiefs of Staff who in September 1941 expressed the view "that the entry of Russia into the war made no fundamental change in our major strategy"? The core problem with much of the historical critique of Churchill does not lie in its details, many of which are indeed right. Rather, and more fundamentally, the hollowness of the critique results from its lack of an adequate standard for judging statesmanship, and war statesmanship above all. Forgetting that most human beings usually err in predicting the future, too many historians seem to grade statesmen (and Churchill in particular) as if they were scrutinizing the footnotes of a sloppy undergraduate's term paper. It is perhaps wiser to remember how often judgments in war are wrong, and to assess a statesman's or a soldier's qualities by the number and importance of the situations that he evaluates correctly, rather than by those in which he errs. Furthermore, the sum total of a statesman's work in a war situation often has more importance than his specific choices. To say, as is probably correct, that in 1940 Churchill pressed too hard for antisubmarine tactics that were unlikely to succeed should not blind us to the drive and coherence he gave to Britain's war against the U-boat by constituting the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, to which he gave unremitting attention throughout the hard years in the North Atlantic until 1943. Furthermore, in considering incidents of personal harshness (and Churchill was no more rough with his subordinates than Roosevelt could be with his, including the ailing Harry Hopkins) some allowance must be made for pressures that the scholar, or even the memoirist, can only dimly conjure up in the comfort of an author's chair. The moods of peace and contemplation differ in the most fundamental way from the crucible of wartime leadership. The difficulty writers have in putting themselves in the place of a wartime political leader, who bears manifold responsibilities and carries stresses that they have never borne, is the gratest obstacle to sound historical judgment on wartime statesmanship. Indeed, even the immediate subordinates of the man at the top only dimly understand, much less share, the acute pressures or the perspective of a prime minister or a president. When examined with a broader and truer set of standards, Churchill's record is astonishingly good. Consider his largest political and strategic judgments. In 1938 he judged aright the importance of opposing Hitler early, at a time when the odds were against the German dictator. Arguments that he exaggerated the German air menace and underestimated the strain on Britain's financial resources miss the central point, which was that firm opposition to Hitler by a coalition led by Britain, with France and at least one of the East European powers, made sense before Hitler had completed his rearmament and laid his hands on the resources of Eastern Europe. He was right too in the weight he assigned to the American relationship, and in the assiduousness with which he and Roosevelt constructed the closest alliance in history. And he was right as well in his concern about Soviet intentions in Europe, little though he could do to thwart them. Churchill's record at the operational level is more mixed. His appreciation of the requirements of elaborate air defense systems in 1940 and again in 1944 to counter the German manned and unmanned aerial assaults on London owes something, of course, to his prewar experience. He deserves some credit for the concept of a landing at Anzio in 1944 (which, though badly executed, was potentially an important strike in the Italian campaign). On more than one occasion, to be sure, he advocated courses of action that could have proved a desperate error; these include his willingness to commit some of the scant reserves of the RAF to the fighting in France in June 1940, his belief in jupiter (an amphibious assault on northern Norway), and his fascination with a similarly extravagant plan for British landings in the Netherlands East Indies in 1944 or 1945. Weighed against these undoubted errors is the cardinal fact that despite having the supreme power to act as he wished, he allowed himself to be talked out of every one of them. More important, one can find numerous examples of sound operational judgment — his drive for a technologically sophisticated set of solutions to the problems of a cross-Channel invasion, his belief in the eventual success of daylight precision bombing by the US Army Air Forces, and his support for an early amphibious strike in Italy in 1944. Moreover, Churchill acted as the patron of odd and eccentric agencies of war — from the cryptanalysts of Bletchley Park to the Commandos and Chindits to a small technological research establishment responsible for such inventions as the PIAT light antitank grenade thrower and the antiship limpet mine. More importantly, his constant questioning and prodding of his generals undoubtedly led to far greater activity on their part than they would otherwise have shown. Churchill's war leadership rested in part on his broad strategic vision, and in part on the effect of his probing questions and efforts to animate each of the many parts of the war effort. One of Churchill's greatest contributions to the war lay in his ability to define as battles the vague, generalized domains of a prolonged and murky struggle. It was he who coined the terms "Battle of Britain" and "Battle of the Atlantic," which have remained in use among historians more than a half century after the event. More than mere ringing phrases, these terms drew an encompassing circle around varied military activities that were functionally related but that did not lie in the province of any one theater commander or any single service. In each case Churchill would convene a special committee, which he chaired, to bring together every part of the government with responsibility for the task at hand, to sort out priorities and tasks, and to define critical problems. The specially created committees to deal with D-Day sped up the development and production of the specialized equipment (from mobile harbors to amphibious tanks) needed for the assault on Fortress Europe. The Crossbow Committee monitored the development of the German revenge weapons — the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 missile — and supported the various countermeasures (air defense, bombing of launch sites, and deception plans) devised to contain the threat. Perhaps most successful of all was the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, which gave unparalleled coherence to the British side of the air and naval campaign to secure the Atlantic sea lanes. One of Churchill's greatest tasks in the Second World War, and one for which his previous experience had uniquely fitted him, was the management of the great Allied coalition against Hitler. Composed of disparate and to some extent antagonistic elements, the Grand Alliance could easily have come apart in any of a number of ways. Churchill faced a three-tiered problem. After 1940 nothing mattered more than the ties between Britain and its two most important potential, and then real, partners, the Soviet Union and the United States. The participation of these two powers in the war, he told Parliament after the fall of Singapore in the dark days of February 1942, "are two tremendous fundamental facts which will in the end dominate the world situation and make victory possible in a form never possible before." His readiness to support the Soviet Union, despite his long-standing opposition to Communism, and his ardent pursuit of the American alliance laid the groundwork for eventual victory. In these relations Churchill had an exceedingly weak hand to play, particularly vis — vis the Americans. In 1940 and 1941 Britain nearly bankrupted itself, even as its forces were driven from the Continent in one débacle after another. As a result of British defeats in France, Greece, and North Africa, Americans entertained the gravest doubts about British military capacities, and many Americans, including the president, viewed with a mixture of skepticism, distaste, and suspicion British imperial policy. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Churchill and his advisers had their way on virtually every major strategic decision — until the end of June 1944, when he was forced to yield to the American insistence on executing the long-planned (and in his view superfluous) invasion of southern France (dragoon) as well as the assault on Normandy. The invasion of North Africa in 1942, followed by the attack on Italy in 1943 and follow-on operations there until the winter of 1944, represented the unfolding of a Churchillian strategic design not too different from that laid out in his memoranda prepared for the first Washington conference in 1942. Even later in 1944 Churchill retained his freedom of action, cajoling some modicum of American support for a wildly unpopular policy of intervention in the Greek civil war. Churchill cultivated the Americans through personal relationships, including his friendship with Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's intimate adviser and with the president himself, with whom he they exchanged an extraordinary sequence of messages throughout the war. With the Soviets no such relations were possible. Nonetheless, Churchill managed to support the Soviet Union in the war, while yielding neither to the enthusiasm of some of his Cabinet for a premature Second Front to aid Russia nor to the pessimism of his military advisers, who doubted Russia's ability to survive. Relations with the great Allies were never far from his mind, as in April 1943 when he exploded in fury at the news that General Eisenhower was contemplating canceling husky (the invasion of Sicily), if it turned out that two German divisions were in the area of the assault objective. If the presence of two German divisions is held to be decisive against any operation of an offensive or amphibious character open to the million men now in North Africa, it is difficult to see how the war can be carried on. Months of preparation, sea power and air power in abundance, and yet two German divisions are sufficient to knock it all on the head. . . . I trust the chiefs of staff will not accept these pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines, from whoever they come. We have told the Russians that they cannot have their supplies by the Northern convoy for the sake of "Husky," and now "Husky" is to be abandoned if there are two German divisions (strength unspecified) in the neighborhood. What Stalin would think of this, when he has 185 German divisions on his front, I cannot imagine. At the same time Churchill fended off the more outrageous demands of the Soviet government and understood, earlier than any other Allied statesman, the threat a Communist Russia would pose to those East European states liberated from one horror by the Red Army only to find another imposed upon them. A second tier of relationships that absorbed Churchill's time and attention was that with the Empire and the Commonwealth, which also required adroit handling. India and the self-governing dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) provided resources, strategic depth, and manpower, including much of the front-line combat strength of the Imperial ground forces. The Empire required management as well. India was convulsed by internal struggles against British rule; South Africa had a large isolationist element and barely joined the war in 1939; Canada could not impose conscription on its French-speaking population (and therefore not on its Anglophones either); Australia and New Zealand clamored to have their forces under a united command, and to withdraw them to the Pacific immediately upon the outbreak of war with Japan. To navigate his way through these relationships Churchill had to struggle with Middle East commanders who, for example, opposed the unification of Australian forces under a single commander, or with dominion prime ministers who had to be consulted and cajoled, but who could not be given formal decision-making power in the British Cabinet. A third level of coalition relations was that of lesser Allies and neutrals. Of these none was more important, or more difficult, than the management of the Free French under Charles de Gaulle. Unlike President Roosevelt, who loathed de Gaulle, Churchill understood that the prickly, vain, and uncontrollable general had, unlike other putative French leaders, a real following among the French people. In a similar vein, he did his best to stand by the exiled governments of Greece and Poland, in the face of overwhelming pressures from Communist movements that were determined to wrest power from them in the wake of liberation from Nazi rule. Regarding the neutral powers he was, with some exceptions (Switzerland, most notably), far more ruthless. Seeking to expand the war against Hitler in 1939, he favored violating the neutrality of Norway by mining its territorial waters, arguing that "small nations must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedom." Perhaps the grimmest example of his determination was his ordering the assault on the French fleet at Oran in Algeria only a few weeks after France's surrender to Germany in 1940. Churchill's conduct of the diplomacy of war reveals an extraordinary blend of techniques and approaches. When compared with the cross-purposes at which, for example, the Allies of the First World War operated, the cohesiveness of the Grand Alliance stands out as a remarkable feat. Churchill's personal control of those relations — through extensive correspondence and frequent overseas trips for private meetings and the large conferences that dominated the strategy of the war — accounts for much of their success. — 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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did Churchill take from this massive experience of and reflection upon
war? Oddly, perhaps, the key may be found in a pamphlet — an essay,
really — published about his chief hobby, painting, which he explicitly
compared with the art of war: "It is the same kind of problem as
unfolding a long, sustained, interlocked argument. It is a proposition
which, whether of few or numberless parts, is commanded by a single unity
of conception." Churchill, a talented amateur painter, brought an
artist's perspective to bear on war. The selection of broad themes (a
word which he used often in both contexts) and the marshaling of detail
to support those large ideas formed an important part of his war statecraft
as much as it did of his palette. Painting cannot be done to hard and
fast rules or to a rigid schedule; it must be adapted to the scene before
it; and room must remain for creativity and adaptation to shifting lights
and the artist's own flashes of insight — such artistic truths applied
no less to Churchill's war leadership than to his essays in oils. Churchill's
frequent use of the word "proportion" is revealing. Often he
would remind his colleagues during World War II of the need to set particular
operations into the larger context of the scheme of the war. Indeed, much
of his genius for war lay in his ability to see the relationship between
the large and the minute elements of conflict and to make the latter,
where possible, fit the former. He welcomed his sea voyage to the United
States following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor because "it is perhaps
a good thing to stand away from the canvas from time to time and take
a full view of the picture."
