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BOOK REVIEWS
NOT FOR PUBLICATION?
War Diaries 1939-1945, by Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25 ($38), member price $28.
Review by Andrew Roberts
Mr. Roberts is the author of Eminent Churchillians (reviewed FH 85:38 and 95:4), and Churchill, Embattled Hero (FH 90:35), and is a member of ICS(UK). His reviews were published as follows: Alanbrooke's War Diaries in The Sunday Telegraph, 6 May; Best's Study in Greatness in The Daily Telegraph, 28 April. They are reprinted here by courtesy of the author.
"ON NO ACCOUNT MUST THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK BE PUBLISHED," wrote Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke on the opening page of his wartime diary, and it is easy to understand why. As the "Master of Strategy," the man Churchill had implored to become Britain's senior soldier, Alanbrooke was the repository of all the most important wartime secrets. Even when they were published in 1957, the diaries were heavily censored both on grounds of national security and for fear of antagonising powerful figures such as the then American President Dwight Eisenhower and the past and serving prime ministers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.
They are now published unexpurgated for the first time and, although it has long been no secret that Alanbrooke did not always see eye to eye on strategic matters with Churchill, it is only now apparent that for much of the war he could hardly bear the prime minister. Churchill, on the other hand, seems to have harboured no reciprocal ill-will towards Alanbrooke.
Alanbrooke's influence on global strategy cannot be underestimated. It was he, more even than Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin, who set out the stages by which Nazi Germany was going to be defeated in the West. It was he who laid down the crucial sequence of North Africa, Italy and Normandy as the path to Berlin. Once thought of as a tough, humourless, Ulster-born "brass hat," it is now clear that Alanbrooke was a passionate man given to bouts of depression and elation and also of fury against many of those with whom he had to work, especially Generals Marshall, Eisenhower and Patton and much of the British political establishment.
His cautious, painstaking approach often clashed with that of Churchill. It was the dichotomy of a chess-player versus a poker-player. Yet Churchill never once overruled his Chiefs of Staff Committee, however much he might have disagreed with them at times. The shadow of the Great War disaster at Gallipoli still hung over him and he knew better than to trust his impulsive genius more than Alanbrooke's logical arguments. In his turn, Alanbrooke considered it his duty to prevent Churchill from getting Britain into another Gallipoli, a task in which he succeeded when quashing Churchill's plans for attacking the Balkans in 1943 and Sumatra in 1944.
Although the minutes of the Chiefs of Staff Committee in the Public Record Office give the bare, factual outlines of what was discussed and agreed in the meetings, these new diaries flesh out the story and record the often volcanic rows which developed between the key players. Far from being the impassive, Olympian figures of wartime propaganda, Churchill and the High Command were often despairing of what to do next and at bitter loggerheads over the way the war should be fought.
Where Churchill was romantic, boisterous, inspirational and occasionally, so Alanbrooke suspected, drunk, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff was cautious, pessimistic, sober and adamant. Both men were combative, wilful, driven and anxious to prevail. The personal tension between the men eventually worked in Britain's favour, ensuring that grand strategy combined a mixture of Churchill's genius and Alanbrooke's professionalism. It was a pained, often exasperated working relationship that nonetheless helped to win the Second World War, even if it collapsed soon afterwards.
"Brookie wants to have it both ways," commented Clementine Churchill when the first of his two memoirs, The Turn of the Tide, was published in 1957, after he had written a fulsome (if somewhat hypocritical) dedication in the copy he sent Churchill. As Montgomery told the book's editor, the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, Churchill was "very angry indeed" at this, the first crack in the edifice of his wartime reputation. He would have been apoplectic if he had read what Alanbrooke and Bryant had excised from the diaries.
Yet it must be recalled that Alanbrooke was often generous to Churchill in the diaries and he regularly pointed out that they were written at times of tremendous stress, often late at night, and as a way of letting off steam and thus preventing his irritation with his colleagues becoming apparent to their faces. They therefore probably saved as many rows as they documented.
In the major strategic arguments of the war, and especially in delaying the Second Front until June 1944 when the Allies were properly ready, Alanbrooke was right and it was probably very fortunate that a "No man" was where he was instead of yet another one of the "Yes men" who surrounded Churchill.
These diaries were a psychological safety-valve for a soldier who laboured under as great a weight of political and military pressure as any in history and they should be read as such. As he broke yet another pencil in half, saying "Prime Minister, I flatly disagree," Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke was doing his duty better than any other Allied general on active service. Part of Churchill's greatness lay in the fact that he appointed Alanbrooke and, albeit often grudgingly, always accepted his advice.
"IN VICTORY, MAGNANIMITY"
Churchill: A Study in Greatness, by Geoffrey Best, London, Hambledon, 370 pp., illus., first English edition published at £19.95 ($30), CC Book Club price $25.
Review by Andrew Roberts
History is, as Pieter Geyl called it in Napoleon: For and Against (1945), "an argument without end," and this book is a masterly summation of the present arguments for and against Winston Churchill. Although he usually comes down in Churchill's favour, Geoffrey Best is scrupulously objective in explaining the anti-Churchill case of the so-called "revisionists." Indeed, no better book has been written about the state of the historiographical struggle over Churchill.
Geoffrey Best is well placed to adopt the Olympian stance necessary to eschew subjectivity in this most emotive of historical fields. A former history professor at Edinburgh and Sussex universities, he is a senior member of St Antony's College, Oxford. Unlike some academic historians, he has a felicitous turn of phrase. I defy anyone who starts his chapter on 1940, "His Finest Hour," not to finish it in a sitting.
Unfortunately, this book has been published just too early for Best to be able to include reference to the second volume of David Irving's Life of Churchill (expected in August). He does make short work of several of the more hoary anti-Churchill myths, writing, "I have enjoyed making my own mind up." His subtitle‹an answer, perhaps, to the late Sir Robert Rhodes James's Churchill: A Study in Failure (1970)‹allows no doubt as to which side Best finally favours.
Yet this is by no means an uncritical, Fifties-style hagiography. Best admits Churchill's "innocence of false modesty" (that is, his vanity); his error in rejoining the Gold Standard in 1925 at a level which dangerously overvalued the pound; his "over-the-top" rhetoric before the rise of Hitler; and he states that Churchill's pro-King stance during the abdication crisis "suggested that there was something amiss in his head." These are today's standard views, perhaps, but this eminently sane book is, in its quiet and dignified way, occasionally ferociously politically incorrect. The analysis of Churchill's anti-independence Indian policy includes the opinion that Mahatma Gandhi's "own non-violence often served as a signal for the violence of others." The strategic bombing of German cities, Best writes, "gave German civilians the same opportunity" as British civilians of joining the dangers of the front line so long endured by their fighting men.
Best agrees with the view I propagated in 1994 of Churchill as an unashamed white supremacist, something which caused outrage at the time but is now generally accepted, especially if placed in its historical and social context. And we are spared the tendentious moralising of historians such as Clive Ponting, who wish us to judge Churchill according to the standards of the 21st-century BBC rather than those of 19th century Blenheim Palace.
This book is particularly impressive when it comes to criticising the views of the Tory Nationalist school, which takes Churchill to task for not making peace with Hitler in 1941 in order to save the British Empire, remain independent from America and preserve Britain from socialism. Best describes the views of Dr. John Charmley and Alan Clark as the "most prominent and powerful" so far put forward against Churchill, but he dismisses them as resting on the suppositions that the Empire was not already crumbling and that Britain could somehow have remained free within easy reach of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Best writes: "These suppositions are simply not believable by anyone who has taken the measure of the mentality of Adolf Hitler, the principles of National Socialism, and the directions in which military technology was developing."
Full of wise summations of difficult issues, this book represents far more
than the jeu d'esprit that the author claims for it in his introduction. If he finds Churchill's schooldays "a bit of a puzzle," for example, or believes that there "is no generally agreed conclusion" to the debate over the sinking of the French fleet at Oran in June 1940, he has the intellectual self-confidence to say so.
By encouraging his readers to come to their own conclusions, Best subtly
guides us towards his own mature and overwhelmingly pro-Churchill ones. The argument over Churchill will not end, but it will rarely be conducted as impressively as this.
MYTH AND REVISION, SHAKEN AND STIRRED
Churchill, by Ian S. Wood. British History in Perspective series, New York: St. Martin's Press, 220 pp. hardbound, published at $49.95. Member price $36.
Review by David Freeman
Mr. Freeman earned his Ph.D. in Modern British History from Texas A&M University. He teaches at California State University, Fullerton.
Ian Wood is a Lecturer in History at Napier University in Edinburgh and a tutor with the Open University. His book is aimed primarily at students, but the general reader will find this to be a solid, thoughtful and up-to date assessment of Churchill's career. Regarding the production of yet another conventional biography as superfluous, Wood adopts a thematic approach. The brief monograph's nine chapters analyze topics such as: Churchill the Warrior, Churchill and Appeasement, Churchill and the United States, and so on. These essays rely on much of the most recent (and best) scholarship in Churchill studies with all evidence duly documented. The results are first rate and go a long way towards confounding recent revisionist theories.
Wood addresses many of the tired old points that revisionists have hammered away at over the years, but gives these topics a refreshing twist because he takes the responsible approach of providing balance and perspective. Thus, on the book's very first page Wood observes that it has often been said Churchill "derived a real excitement for war and preparation for it." But the author immediately goes on to write that "it was a guilty excitement, as Churchill often made clear when he thought aloud about it, and he was never indifferent to war's implacable human price." To follow this up Wood produces an appropriate illustrating quote from Churchill's very first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force.
Having dispensed with the persistent myth that Churchill was a lifelong jingoist, Wood goes on to trace the development of his subject's views on military administration. One of the principle themes to emerge here and from the rest of the book is Churchill's passionate commitment to parliamentary principles, including civilian control of the military. Thus, Wood argues, Churchill believed "Germany's major errors in the [First World] war . . . were a result of blinkered military professionals overriding the will of politicians, and he came close to despair at the weakness of a Prime Minister over commanders in the field whom he could not dismiss." Churchill absorbed these lessons and, as Wood phrases it, "would not flinch from" them later when against all advice he insisted on assuming the role of Minister of Defense in 1940 to go with his commission as Prime Minister (p. 7).
Wood's forte, then, lies in seeing Churchill at all times in the context of his entire career. This approach serves to answer critics who charge that Churchill himself bore as much responsibility as anyone for Britain's military unpreparedness during the Appeasement years. The allegation rests upon Churchill's strong, and successful, support for economies in the nation's finances during his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But, as Wood observes, Churchill "was simply carrying out, with the tenacity he brought to every task, a Treasury brief to bring all expenditure under control" (p. 10). By implication, had the Former Naval Person been back at the Admiralty during the late 1920s, he undoubtedly would have been the foremost proponent of naval rearmament.
Churchill's zeal for the British constitution included lending the full weight of his formidable talents to supporting the policies of cabinets in which he served even when those policies did not include the judicious moderation he had often advised. Nowhere is this more clear than in the events surrounding the General Strike. "Any version of 1926," Wood correctly argues, "based on the notion of Baldwin as the moderate and Churchill the uncompromising class warrior is clearly misleading" (p. 130). As readers of Martin Gilbert's fifth volume in the official biography (The Prophet of Truth) are aware, Churchill consistently supported a much more lenient policy towards the striking miners than that adopted by the Cabinet. But the democratic process having taken its course, the principled Chancellor did not hesitate to rally around the government when crisis erupted.
Finally, Wood makes the crucial point to remember when assessing the life of Winston Churchill - a point that Time magazine lost sight of in selecting its so-called "Person of the Century." The matter arises in Wood's discussion of Churchill's postwar premiership, when the restored Prime Minister demonstrated a "disinclination to lead Britain into Europe after 1951...deferring important decision on the modernization of industry and industrial relations." All of this may have set Britain up for more painful adjustments later on. "Yet the very fact that a democratic Western Europe re-emerged in 1945 to forge new institutions and relationships to bring former enemies together," Wood concludes, "owed everything to Churchill's decision that in 1940, Britain should fight on against Hitler whatever the risks or the cost." (p. 112).
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