May 7, 2015

Finest Hour 117, Winter 2002-03

Page 38

By David Freeman

Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study by Algius Valiunas, Rowman and Littlefield, 196 pp. $35, member price $28
Churchill’s Cold War: The Politics of Personal Diplomacy, by Klaus Larres, Yale University Press, 592 pp. $40, member price $30


Winston Churchill was a believer in the “Great Man” theory of history: that individuals make a difference. The proof was his performances in World War II and its Cold War aftermath, which are treated here in two heavily academic works.

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Given Algis Valiunas’s title, Churchill’s Military Histories: A Rhetorical Study, it is best to explain that this book is not an evaluation of Churchill’s qualities as a military historian. In the 19th century its title might have been A Study of the Written Rhetoric of Sir Winston Churchill as Exhibited in His Military Histories. But one fact the author neglects to mention is that most of Churchill’s books were military histories. Thus Valiunas takes his place alongside Manfred Weidhorn as an evaluator of Churchill the writer.

This book began as a doctoral dissertation, and its appeal will probably be to those with a scholarly interest in literature, political science, and history. Yet Valiunas has produced a solid little book that defends Churchill’s rhetorical style while placing each of his books in the context of its time. “Each of Churchill’s histories must be considered in the peculiar light it gives off,” he writes; “the theme is always war, as regarded by a writer with an aristocratic turn of mind in democratic times” (2).

Valiunas begins each chapter with a survey of how the subject at hand (Victoria’s “little” wars, the two World Wars, Marlborough and A History of the English Speaking Peoples) have been addressed by other authors. He then analyzes Churchill’s assessment of events.

Churchill’s early writings of the Imperial wars are “works of ambitious political advocacy, whose object is nothing less than to fortify the British will and thus to ensure the Empire’s continuation and advancement” (10). As for the otherwise valiant Boer farmers in the Boer War, Valiunas believes that Churchill condemns them because “they shirk the one task that elevates an imperial people above mere greed and cruelty: the White Man’s Burden” (2). If that sounds crude by today’s standards, one should bear in mind the bitterly racist attitude of the Boers, who resented British efforts to guarantee basic civil rights to the native African population. Often forgotten today, amid charges of imperialist greed, is that the British were driven to colonize in part out of religious convictions that sought to end the slave trade and certain cultural practices that even the most doctrinaire modern anthropologists would have difficulty defending.

Valiunas describes The World Crisis as Churchill’s “unknown masterpiece,” and argues that “the reasons for its greatness are the reasons for its obscurity” (45). The effect of Great War literature by Sassoon, Owen, Graves, et al. “has been to elevate the helplessness of the common solider so that it alone grants the power to see the whole thing in the correct perspective.”

To suffer in war without understanding why, according to this view, is to acquire the most profound understanding of war—indeed of political life” (51). Churchill himself understood war’s grisly horror first hand. “But he also knew to be false the conclusion that these others had drawn from their experience: he knew that the unexampled magnitude of the war’s carnage did not mean the death of political life as men had previously known it” (45).

People have and always will disagree to the point of violence at various levels, including the cataclysmic. This does not discredit the efforts of statesmen to preclude war, or of military planners to execute it when necessary. Churchill cannot be faulted for speaking the truism: “The story of the human race is War” (45).

In preparing Marlborough and A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Valiunas believes, Churchill had one eye on the past and one eye on the storm he saw gathering. The writing of these multi-volume works grounded their author in the knowledge of how a delicate balance of myth and realpolitik figures in the successful prosecution of a great national effort. Thus Churchill prepared himself for his most important role: that of orator and generalissimo.

This certainly somewhat self-conscious effort in itself belies the option that individual actions and responsibility do not affect the course of history. Yet this is the very concept most frequently used to assail Churchill’s account of the Second World War. A.J.P. Taylor, Valiunas writes, “is just the sort of historian that Tocqueville feared democracy would produce”—one who denies “personal responsiblity in the face of events too overwhelming to command, or even to comprehend” (120). Unlike Taylor, Valiunas concludes, “Churchill always considers how things might be done to escape the worst” (124). Decision makers could have acted differently at any time between the conferences of Versailles and Munich, and were certainly advised by many to do so.

Some have pondered Churchill’s famous recollection in his war memoirs of the poem about the “Clattering Train” (The Gathering Storm, chapter 7). He wrote that in 1935 he recalled these lines “but did not repeat them.” Churchill did not acept the inevitability of the next war, but continued to believe that apt and timely decisions could avert disaster. Valiunas shows that Churchill wrote about war in the same way that he handled it professionally, by keeping things in their proper perspective and examining all the options.

As teenagers we are taught simplified versions of history that are easy to comprehend. Those who, like this writer, go on to make careers in history must study events in all their grisly detail. But when it comes our turn to teach (especially survey courses to large groups of students that include few if any history majors), we teachers find ourselves reverting to the simplified interpretations we learned as students. The difference is that we have a deeper understanding as to why such interpretations are valid.

As someone who has has read numerous books about Churchill, I had developed a fairly clear picture of his post-1945 career: The advent of the atomic age made dialogue between the leaders of the world’s major powers imperative so as to avoid misunderstanding, reduce tension and forestall a war of unthinkable devastation. With his forceful personality—combining as it did charm, ability, sincerity and a remarkable talent for articulating his views—Churchill had been one of the most successful statesmen in history. His success caused him to develop an abiding faith in the benefits of “summitry,” his word for meetings between great powers at the highest level.

After the Second World War, Churchill hoped to secure peace by using his experience to bring about meaningful dialogue between the newly emerged superpowers. This noble goal was thwarted both by the paralysis of Soviet leadership caused by Stalin’s final illness and death, and the wave of anticommunism that simultaneously gripped the United States. With Germany defeated and Britain economically prostrate, Churchill could no longer command the attention of his former allies as he once did. Détente would have to wait. Realizing that he did not have time to wait himself, a frustrated Churchill resigned, living out a retirement tinged with melancholy. Ironically, when détente did come about in the 1970s, it was characterized by the very “summitry” Churchill had championed, but through bilateral negotiation—so far had Britain’s place in the world fallen.

This view of Churchill’s later years has now been solidified by Klaus Larres in a mammoth book that falls into the category of “history by exhaustion.” A native of Germany, Larres is Jean Monnet Professor in European Foreign and Security Policy at Queen’s University, Belfast. His detailed history pairs nearly 400 pages of text with over 130 pages of dense notes. Only the most diehard students of Churchill or the Cold War are ever likely to read this book. Even fewer will make their way through the notes which, apart from simple documentation, refer researchers to just about everything published relating to Churchill and the Cold War right down to the time this book went to press.

One cannot help but think that Churchill himself would appreciate the thoroughness with which Larres has gone about his task. Clearly this book is not for the general reader, nor is it intended to be; but it establishes its author as a recognized expert.

The scope of Larres’s achievement is considerable: a tour de force that dispels “the still widespread perception of Churchill as a simplistic cold warrior ….He was never such a person.” Larres notes that from 1945 to 1955 Churchill displayed “a much more sophisticated understanding of the necessity to negotiate and enter into compromise solutions with the ideological and military enemy than his ‘cold warrior’ image allows for.”

To establish Churchill’s credentials as a face-to-face negotiator of great experience and ability, Larres dedicates the first hundred pages of his book to Churchill’s pre-1945 career, going all the way back to the days when, as the youngest minister of Asquith’s preWorld War I government, he hoped to negotiate an end to Britain’s naval arms race with Germany. The implication is clear: had more people thought like Churchill in the Edwardian era (and in the 1930s), not one but two horrible cataclysms might have been avoided.

Who then is to gainsay what Churchill attempted after 1945? It takes two (honest) parties to negotiate. If only one party is willing or can be trusted, then either nothing will be negotiateed (as in 1911 with the Kaiser’s Germany) or the results will be disastrous (as in 1938 at Munich).

Larres’s detailed record depicts Churchill’s personal diplomacy as having been both imaginative and visionary. His ultimate failure did not result from any lack of effort. “Churchill did his best to find solutions to highly dangerous conflict situations to avoid major catastrophes and create a more stable and peaceful world” (xvi). The man who was so often right when others were wrong was, typically, right at the end as well.


Professor Freeman teaches at California State University Fullerton.

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