March 28, 2015

Finest Hour 127, Summer 2005

Page 38

By Paul H. Courtenay

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, by David Reynolds. Allen, 527 pp, £30, member price $48.


You are over seventy years of age, not in the best of health, exhausted after six years of energetic and unremitting leadership in a struggle for survival. You are a world statesman from whose lips every utterance is intently studied. And you are the leader of a political party working to regain office in the foreseeable future. So how about spending the next eight years writing two million words in a six-volume history of the recent cataclysm? And, by the way, some critics half a century hence will be amazed and even scornful if you do not do so all by yourself!

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Professor and ICS (UK) member David Reynolds is far too good a historian to be among them. His important and masterly book reveals all the pressures placed on Winston Churchill in writing this monumental work, and how these were overcome. Some have been well known for a long time, but others are newly revealed surprises.

Churchill’s team of researchers (known as “the Syndicate”) was identified early on, for he printed an acknowledgment of their services at the start of each volume. Chief among them were Sir William Deakin, who handled diplomatic and political material; Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall, who assembled the military items; and Commodore Gordon Allen, who was in charge of naval matters. Others, such as Denis Kelly, were part of the team, and Lord Ismay was also on hand with general guidance from his experience as Military Secretary to the War Cabinet.

The three chief players were able to imitate their master’s style so effectively that they sometimes drafted whole chapters; this did not prevent some reviewers from remarking: “One of the most engaging things about the book was that he wrote it himself”; or, “The tremendous personality of the author glowers and shines in almost every sentence.”

One of the most interesting revelations is that the Cabinet Secretary (Sir Edward Bridges, later Sir Norman Brook) not only arranged for Churchill to have access to Government-owned papers from his premiership—a facility denied to other authors for at least a further thirty years—but also vetted each volume to ensure that the current administration could have no objections to what was to be published. Brook later drafted parts of the text and became, in effect, both an official censor and an unofficial editor. During his five years as Prime Minister Churchill had taken the precaution of having all his minutes and personal telegrams printed and compiled in sixty-eight volumes; it was thus difficult for the government to insist on retaining them. His own wartime working files, held in 600 bulky folders, were stored at the Cabinet Office, where it was easy for the Syndicate to consult them.

David Reynolds reveals the immense sums generated from the sale of the work to British and U.S. publishers, newspapers and magazines. Shrewd legal advice enabled Churchill to convey his papers to a trust, which was entitled to sell material to the publishers without incurring tax; had this not been done, he would have been taxed on his work as an author at 97.5%; in the event he was able—for the first time in his life—to put money worries behind him and to ensure a comfortable future for himself and his family. We are told how Churchill, on assembling his material, had to reassess some of his earlier opinions, e.g., his under-estimation in 1939-40 of the power of the tank, his complacency in 1940-41 over the effect of air-power against ships, and a growing uncertainty that the western Allies could have beaten the Soviet Union to Berlin in 1945. Deakin persuaded him to soften his view that German generals would have overthrown Hitler if a strong line had been taken by Britain and France over Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Churchill well understood that current diplomatic imperatives meant that he had to be delicate in what he said about contemporary world figures, such as Truman, Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Tito, and the leaders of the Dominions; he also toned down his references to Stalin because he did not want to undermine his hopes for detente. There were also some surprising omissions and minimal references to important events. For example, the Spanish Civil War was barely mentioned, and Stalingrad received scant treatment; above all, it is inevitable that nothing could be revealed about the “Ultra” decrypts of German codes and their effect on decisionmaking. For all these reasons The Second World War cannot be seen as definitive, however magnificent it is in other respects. Incidentally David Reynolds does not make the mistake, made by a number of reviewers, that the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded for this book.

As each of the six volumes is produced, Reynolds shows how publishers and press editors constantly hustled Churchill to meet their deadlines. This had some unfortunate repercussions, notably in Volume I, which contained so many typographical and similar errors that two pages of errata had to be inserted. A principal factor in this was the Book of the Month Club in the United States, which had contracted to receive new volumes for their December issues in time for the Christmas market; this permanent Sword of Damocles, notwithstanding the lucrative returns, clearly had an effect on the rush to complete each volume when greater leeway would have been beneficial.

It is quite clear that, for the historical record, the Conservative defeat in 1945 was a blessing in disguise (as Clementine had suggested); this magnum opus could never have been attempted if Winston Churchill had retained the office of Prime Minister.

David Reynolds concludes that, although Churchill may not have personally written most of the book, he decisively set its tone and parameters, and guided and sustained its direction; he remained “in command of history.” This is a major work of detection and scholarship; it is amazing that David Reynolds wrote it all himself without a Syndicate of his own.

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