Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [12]
Churchill continued: “Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”
Churchill rejected the demand that those who had been at the centre of the pre-war appeasement policy not be rewarded for their pre-war stance. He told the House of Commons: “Every Minister who tries each day to do his duty shall be respected, and their subordinates must know that their chiefs are not threatened men, men who are here today and gone tomorrow, but that their directions must be punctually and faithfully obeyed. Without this concentrated power we cannot face what lies before us.”
One of Churchill’s ministerial appointments— Captain David Margesson as Chief Whip—was particularly criticized by those who wanted to see the pre-war “Men of Munich” excluded from government. Margesson had been both Stanley Baldwin’s and Neville Chamberlain’s Chief Whip, active in helping to keep Churchill out of office and in dragooning the serried ranks of Conservative Members of Parliament to vote against many of his proposals on national defence, including his advocacy of a Ministry of Supply to enable industry to prepare for the eventuality of war. To a Conservative anti-appeasement Member of Parliament who had voiced his opposition to the retention of Margesson, Churchill wrote: “It has been my deliberate policy to try to rally all the forces for the life and death struggle in which we are plunged, and to let bygones be bygones. I am quite sure that Margesson will treat me with the loyalty that he has given to my predecessors.” He added: “The fault alleged against him which tells the most is that he has done his duty only too well. I do not think that there is anyone who could advise me better about all those elements in the Tory Party who were so hostile to us in recent years. I have to think of unity, and I need all the strength I can get.” As to the Chief Whip’s qualities, Churchill wrote, “I have long had a very high opinion of Margesson’s administrative and executive abilities.” Not long after writing this letter, Churchill appointed Margesson to be Secretary of State for War.
At the centre of Churchill’s mental energies as war leader was his belief in himself—in his abilities and in his destiny. While at school, he had gathered a group of boys around him and explained his confidence that one day, far in the future, when London was under attack from an invader, he would be in command of the capital’s defences. As a young soldier he thought that destiny had somehow marked him out, and he expressed that belief on several occasions in letters to his mother. In 1897, on his way to his first action on the northwest frontier of India, he wrote to her: “I have faith in my star—that I am intended to do something in this world.” In 1900, when he was only twenty-six years old but already a participant in three wars and the author of five books, Captain Percy Scott, a naval gunnery expert whom he had met in the Boer War, predicted a remarkable future for him. “I feel certain,” wrote Scott, “that I shall some day shake hands with you as Prime Minister of England; you possess the two necessary qualifications, genius and plod. Combined, I believe nothing can keep them back.” To Violet Asquith, who had spoken cynically about men in general, Churchill remarked a few years later: “All men are worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.”
During the first six months of 1916, when Churchill was serving as a battalion commander on the Western Front, a German shell had nearly killed him. Writing to his wife, Clementine, that night, he told her of his innermost feelings on contemplating his extinction. Had the shell fallen a mere twenty yards closer to him, he wrote, it would have been “a good ending to a checkered life, a final gift—unvalued—to an ungrateful country—an impoverishment of the war making power of Britain which no one would ever know or measure