June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 116, Autumn 2002

Page 32

By JOHN G. PLIMPTON

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, by Eliot Cohen, Free Press, 288 pages, $25, member price $18

David Stafford begins his Churchill and Roosevelt with a fanciful appreciation of a statue of the two men on a bench in London’s Bond Street. Similar consideration might be given to the statues of Field Marshals Alanbrooke and Montgomery in Whitehall, looking toward Downing Street. There is ample evidence in Alanbrooke’s recently published diaries (see FH 110:42, 112:34) to support the view that he is looking disdainfully away, expressing contempt for the politicians who live at Number 10. Montgomery, however, is staring directly down the street in such a manner to give credence to the story that when Churchill remarked that Monty wanted his job, King George VI replied, “I rather think that he also wants mine.”

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

The tensions between military and civil leadership that have bedeviled nations over the centuries are the subject of Supreme Command. Eliot Cohen, who first presented his theories to the International Churchill Conference in Washington in 1993, uses four case studies to “uncover the nature of strategy-making in war”Lincoln, Clemenceau, Ben-Gurion, and Churchill. While they are all illuminating in different ways, only the last concerns us in this review.

Before considering each leader, Cohen evaluates theories of civilmilitary relations. He invites those who wish to plunge more deeply into the issue to consult an appendix on “The Theory of Civilian Control.” My own plunge was a little too deep to include here, but those so inclined will be wellrewarded for their efforts.

Cohen is an unabashed admirer of Churchill—not an easy position to take in modern academic circles. “Few historical figures escape revisions of their worth as statesmen,” he writes. “This is particularly true of wartime leaders and especially true of Winston Churchill.”

Churchill revisionism began while WSC was still centre-stage, as seen in the diaries of Alanbrooke, Churchill’s Chief of Imperial General Staff. Cohen quotes the 10 September 1944 entry:

[Churchill] has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. I find it hard to remain civil…. It is far better that the world should never know and never suspect the feet of clay on that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again…Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent.

Cohen does not use another diary entry, 29 November 1943, which he cited at our 1993 Churchill Conference, that is even more illuminating about Alanbrooke’s views:

After listening to the arguments put forward during the last two days I feel more like entering a lunatic asylum or nursing home than continuing with my present job. I am absolutely disgusted with politicians [sic] methods of waging war! Why do they imagine they are experts at a job they know nothing about! It is lamentable to listen to them!

Alanbrooke was not alone in his views. General Ismay recalled a victory celebration which Churchill hosted for the chiefs of staff. 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.”

After the war the weight of opinion supported Churchill’s version of events, but it was natural that the academic world would eventually join the chorus of Churchill criticism. They discount the Churchillians (led by Sir John Colville) as “an exclusive closeknit troglodyte group” and consider those who appreciate the great man’s achievement (like The Churchill Center) as mere hero worshippers.

Cohen gives us the full litany of criticisms: instability, reactionism, meddlesomeness, irrationality, etc., but points out how the critics have emphasized the problems and ignored the achievements. (To this reader it is like dwelling on the fact that Babe Ruth struck out over 1,000 times, ignoring his 714 home runs.)

Cohen then presents his principal thesis: “In 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.” He also reminds us of a comment made by Royal Navy Captain Percy Scott in 1899: “I feel certain that I shall someday shake hands with you as Prime Minister of England. You possess the two necessary qualifications: genius and plod.” Cohen makes a strong case that the plod also had a system to it and that there was far more order and discipline to his work habits and the zigs and zags of his policy-making.

Churchill attributed much of the criticism to people’s inability to understand his dichotomous approach to issues. In Thoughts and Adventures he wrote that Great Britain

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.

This was written long before recent brain research that fully supports his views.

Many people did not have Churchill’s historical perspective. Professor Lindemann’s remark to General Marshall, who was pressing for an early invasion of Europe (“It’s no use. You are arguing against the casualties of the Somme”) was true. But a greater lesson from the Great War for Churchill was the limitations of senior commanders. “Their whole habit of mind,” he wrote of military staff, “is based on subordination of opinion.”

That characteristic never applied to Churchill, nor to those around him. Cohen suggests that one reason for the military’s constant carping was that Churchill picked commanders who disagreed with him, “even violently.” Ismay agreed. “The one thing that was necessary and indeed that Winston preferred, was someone to stand up to him.”

Ismay also pointed out that, despite Churchill’s immense powers as both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, he took the advice of his military advisers on critical military matters. They ranged from his many disagreements with the CIGS, from an attack on northern Norway to the strategy against Japan after the fall of Germany (a little-considered issue that almost led to the resignation of the entire Chiefs of Staff), to accepting Cunningham’s position regarding an attack on the French fleet in Alexandria, to Eisenhower’s view that capturing Berlin would waste resources on an objective with little military value.

Churchill was said to have “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” Cohen presents a strong case that Churchill’s art of interrogation was almost as masterful as his art of rhetoric. He controlled events by “incessant, close questioning of the staffs” even about the minutest details. But Cohen’s challenge to revisionist historians is mere swatting of flies compared to his challenge to that giant of political and military leadership, Samuel Huntington, “arguably the greatest political scientist of our time.”

In The Soldier and the State Huntington created the “normal” theory of civil-military relations: “the healthiest and most effective form of civilian control of the military is that which maximizes professionalism by isolating soldiers from politics, and giving them as free a hand as possible in military matters.” Cohen resides in the theoretical camp of Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz in his belief that “war in merely the continuation of politics by other means,” and Georges Clemenceau, who held that “war is too important to be left to the generals.”

Most interpretations of Churchill are not presented within a theoretical framework, although it has been said that there is nothing so practical as a good theory. Cohen has presented us with a very good theory related to civilmilitary relations that should be considered when reading The War Diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, John Keegan’s Churchill’s Generals, Barrie Pitt’s Churchill and the Generals or Stephen Roskill’s Churchill and the Admirals.

Mr. Plumpton is a FH senior editor.