May 7, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 52

Somewhat Short of Reliable

Winston Churchill: War Leader, by Bill Price. Pocket Essentials, Harpenden, Herts., UK, softbound, 160 pp., £7.99.

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Despite its subtitle, this 45,000-word pocket softback is not about Churchill as war leader, although ninety pages are devoted to the two World Wars. It’s a biography: clinical, with few quotations and only fourteen footnotes.

There are only a handful of inaccuracies of any significance. Contrary to Price, Churchill did not formally favor “the eventual creation of a Jewish state,” although he supported it once created. Churchill’s mistake in crossing Fifth Avenue in 1931 and Hitler’s partition of Czechoslovakia are inaccurately described, and no one has yet found the naval signal “Winston is Back” when WSC returned to the Admiralty in September 1939. Churchill had not “danced at the news” of Pearl Harbor, although he might have liked to. But these minor errors of fact are less important than some of the odd conclusions.

Price provides a new take on the World War II Second Front argument. The British military chiefs, he says, had concluded that “If battles were fought in which the opposing forces were equal…the Germans would likely win, so they advocated the use of overwhelming force to guarantee victory.” Hence Churchill’s proposals for attacking the “soft underbelly” of Europe.

One wonders where he got this. General Mark Clark, speaking to the Western Canada Churchill Societies in 1970, admitted that he found the soft underbelly to be “one tough gut”—but neither Clark nor his fellow generals are on record as believing the Germans would win any battle of equal forces.

Covering the final year of the war, Price is completely accurate about the strategic bombing of Germany. He notes that Churchill argued against continuing to raze German cities, and his treatment of Dresden (a Soviet target, confirmed by Attlee) proves that he has read Martin Gilbert or Finest Hour. But a few pages later he says that Churchill “inexplicably” skipped Franklin Roosevelt’s funeral—a fraught and contentious claim. Roosevelt died with the war about to end; could the prime minister dart off in the midst of imminent victory to attend a funeral? Despite Churchill’s initial impulse to attend, Eden and others dissuaded him.

At the same time we read that the wartime coalition was breaking up, in part because Churchill “had alienated many of the other members of the coalition…by appearing to favour the opinions of his circle of cronies, principally Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken and Professor Lindemann” (139). The coalition broke up because Labour wanted a general election.

There are a few other peculiar statements. Price contends that Churchill was sent to the Admiralty in 1911 because Asquith wanted “a safer pair of hands” to deal with the trade unions after the Welsh strikes, which at least needs qualification. The official biographer and others say the move was made because Asquith wanted a spirited pair of hands at the Admiralty and admired Churchill’s pluck during the 1911 Agadir Crisis, which had threatened war with Germany.

Price recounts early naval losses in World War I—but not victories, like the Falkland Islands; he is fair and balanced on Gallipoli and Churchill’s political eclipse in 1915.

Between the wars, Churchill’s decision as Chancellor of the Exchequer to put Britain back on the Gold Standard is given the standard Keynesian interpretation. The author is certainly wrong that Chamberlain joined Halifax in arguing for peace talks with Hitler in 1940; or that the shift in power to America occurred at the Atlantic Charter meeting in August 1941. In Churchill’s second premiership, Price seems to rank defeating the uprisings in Kenya and Malaya among the major foreign policy initiatives, though he does mention WSC’s quest for a Big Three summit conference.

The best part of this little book is the end. The Churchill who emerges from the diaries and memoirs of his colleagues, Price says, “is of a man who often bore the immense responsibility with which he was charged much more heavily than he showed in public. Such descriptions provide a glimpse of the real man which had previously been covered up by the mythology surrounding him, and which Churchill himself made little effort to dispel…. But, in the end, his reputation surely rests on those months between March 1940 and December 1941 when Britain fought on alone against the tyranny of Nazi Germany.”

He should have said May 1940 and June 1941, but no one can argue with his final sentence: “In those months of adversity he proved himself with words and actions which can only be described as heroic.”

This is a nice little book, but lays enough eggs and false trails as to fall somewhat short of reliable. For those in need of a brief life, the winner and still champion is Paul Addison’s Churchill: The Unexpected Hero (in print at $13, $10 in Kindle)—which is still, in the late John Ramsden’s words, the best brief life of Churchill ever published— “and by a long way.”