Sir Max Hastings - Finest Years - Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

Churchill as Warlord 1940-45

William Collins

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Published by HarperPress in 2009

Copyright © Max Hastings 2009

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007263684

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007344116

Version: 2017-07-26

In memory of Roy Jenkins, and our Indian summer friendship

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

One: The Battle of France

Two: The Two Dunkirks

Three: Invasion Fever

Four: The Battle of Britain

Five: Greek Fire

Six: Comrades

Seven: The Battle of America

Eight: A Glimpse of Arcadia

Nine: ‘The Valley of Humiliation’

Ten: Soldiers, Bosses and ‘Slackers’

Eleven: ‘Second Front Now!’

Twelve: Camels and the Bear

Thirteen: The Turn of Fortune

Fourteen: Out of the Desert

Fifteen: Sunk in the Aegean

Sixteen: Tehran

Seventeen: Setting Europe Ablaze

Eighteen: Overlord

Nineteen: Bargaining with an Empty Wallet

Twenty: Athens: ‘Wounded in the House of Our Friends’

Twenty-One: Yalta

Twenty-Two: The Final Act

Keep Reading

Notes and Sources

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

It may well be that the most glorious chapters of our history have yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.

WSC, April 1933

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.

WSC, November 1940

Winston Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the twentieth century, indeed of all time. Yet beyond that bald assertion there are infinite nuances in considering his conduct of Britain’s war between 1940 and 1945, which is the theme of this book. It originated nine years ago, when Roy Jenkins was writing his biography of Churchill. Roy flattered me by inviting my comments on the typescript, chapter by chapter. Some of my suggestions he accepted, many he sensibly ignored. When we reached the Second World War, his patience expired. Exasperated by the profusion of my strictures, he said: ‘You’re trying to get me to do something which you should write yourself, if you want to!’ By that time, his health was failing. He was impatient to finish his own book, which achieved triumphant success.

In the years that followed I thought much about Churchill and the war, mindful of some Boswellian lines about Samuel Johnson: ‘He had once conceived the thought of writing The Life Of Oliver Cromwell…He at length laid aside his scheme, on discovering that all that can be told of him is already in print; and that it is impracticable to procure any authentick information in addition to what the world is already possessed of.’ Among the vast Churchillian bibliography, I was especially apprehensive about venturing anywhere near the tracks of David Reynolds’s extraordinarily original and penetrating In Command of History (2004). The author dissected successive drafts of Churchill’s war memoirs, exposing contrasts between judgements on people and events which the old statesman initially proposed to make, and those which he finally deemed it prudent to publish. Andrew Roberts has painted a striking portrait of wartime Anglo-American relations, and especially of the great summit meetings, in Masters and Commanders (2008). We have been told more about Winston Churchill than any other human being. Tens of thousands of people of many nations have recorded even the most trifling encounters, noting every word they heard him utter. The most vivid wartime memory of one soldier of Britain’s Eighth Army derived from a day in 1942 when he found the prime minister his neighbour in a North African desert latrine. Churchill’s speeches and writings fill many volumes.

Yet much remains opaque, because he wished it thus. Always mindful of his role as a stellar performer upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after 10 May 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity. Within months of his ascent to the premiership, however, he told his staff that he had already schemed the chapters of the book which he would write as soon as the war was over. The outcome was a ruthlessly partial six-volume work which is poor history, if sometimes peerless prose. We shall never know with complete confidence what he thought about many personalities—for instance Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Alanbrooke, King George VI, his cabinet colleagues—because he took good care not to tell us.

Churchill’s wartime relationship with the British people was much more complex than is often acknowledged. Few denied his claims upon the premiership. But between the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, not only many ordinary citizens, but also some of his closest colleagues, wanted operational control of the war machine to be removed from his hands, and some other figure appointed to his role as Minister of Defence. It is hard to overstate the embarrassment and even shame of British people as they perceived the Russians playing a heroic part in the struggle against Nazism, while their own army seemed incapable of winning a battle. To understand Britain’s wartime experience, it appears essential to recognise, as some narratives do not, the sense of humiliation which afflicted Britain amid the failures of its soldiers, contrasted—albeit often on the basis of wildly false information—with the achievement of Stalin’s.

Churchill was dismayed by the performance of the British Army, even after victories began to come at the end of 1942. Himself a hero, he expected others likewise to show themselves heroes. In 1940, the people of Britain, together with their navy and air force, wonderfully fulfilled his hopes. Thereafter, however, much of the story of Britain’s part in the war seems to me that of the prime minister seeking more from his own nation and its warriors than they could deliver. The failure of the army to match the prime minister’s aspirations is among the central themes of this book.