Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [0]
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
Winston Churchill’s War Leadership
Note on Sources
About the Author
ALSO BY MARTIN GILBERT
Copyright Page
The problem is not winning the war, but persuading people to let you win it.
—Winston S. Churchill
Introduction
In February 2002 I was asked to speak in the White House about Churchill’s war leadership. I was invited into the Oval Office, where I showed the President the bust of Churchill that had recently been presented to him by the British Embassy in Washington, and to which he had given pride of place. As the twenty-first century began, a President of the United States was embarking on two military expeditions, the first against Afghanistan and the second against Iraq—not unlike the British punitive expeditions a century earlier, in which Churchill had taken part.
In the second of those early-twenty-first-century expeditions, the one against Iraq, a British Prime Minister joined the United States with commitment and conviction. The Anglo-American war effort against Iraq involved every aspect of war leadership in a small conflict, even though it will be at least a decade before the real stories of that leadership will begin to emerge through the archives of the conflict: the true nature of the Anglo-American link, the Secret Intelligence dimension, the actual relationship between the leaders and their Ministers and advisers, and the precise pattern of decision-making and execution of orders.
These are important matters for recent history, but they are minor compared with the leadership aspects of the Second World War. Unlike the Iraqi adversary in 2003, the German enemy sixty years earlier was able to sustain a ferocious aerial bombardment for more than two years, to sustain a devastating submarine offensive for three years, and to fight tenaciously in the field for more than five years. In addition, Germany was able to acquire, after two years of victorious fighting, a remorseless ally: Japan.
War leadership during the Second World War required intensive concentration and decision-making over a lengthy period, filled with dangers and uncertainties on a scale that has not been repeated since then, even in Korea and Vietnam, harsh and prolonged though those conflicts were. In that regard, Churchill’s war leadership can have no parallel, unless the world plunges back into a disaster of epic proportions, in which an added dimension could well be the nuclear one.
Leadership against global terrorism requires qualities of a different order, which even now are being formulated and put into practice. In the hope that there may still be some aspects of Churchill’s war leadership that can be of service in the present conflict, this book is dedicated to President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
WINSTON CHURCHILL’S WAR LEADERSHIP
When Winston Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, he had been a Member of Parliament for almost forty years. For more than twenty-five of those years he had held high ministerial office, with responsibilities that covered many spheres of national policy and international affairs. Central to the strength of his war leadership was this experience. Churchill could draw upon knowledge acquired in the many fierce political battles and tough international negotiations in which he had been a central and often successful participant. “My knowledge, which has been bought, not taught,” was how he expressed it in the House of Commons during a stormy interwar debate on defence.
Churchill’s knowledge had often been bought at the price of unpopularity and failure. But, above all, it was the experience of dealing, both as a Cabinet Minister from 1905 and as a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence from 1909, with a wide range of national and world issues, and also of persuading a frequently hostile House of Commons to accept the logic and argument of government policy. That experience served as an essential underpinning—and strengthening—of his leadership in the Second World War. For a decade before