Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [15]
Even as Britain faced new attacks and new enemies, Churchill was confident that the justness of the cause would prevail. On 12 December 1941, less than a week after Japan had entered the war by attacking American, British and Dutch possession in the Far East and the Pacific, he told the House of Commons that “when we look around us over the sombre panorama of the world we have no reason to doubt the justice of our cause or that our strength and will-power will be sufficient to sustain it.” Throughout his five years as war leader, Churchill was able to convey the “justice of our cause”— the Allied cause—and, in conveying it, he reflected the belief of the British public. When, on his eightieth birthday, he was praised as having been the “British lion,” he replied with a truer understanding of what his war leadership had been. “It was,” he said, “a nation and a race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” And, he added: “I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right places to use his claws.”
Knowing the nature of the enemy and making sure the nation had no doubt of the moral aspect of the conflict were important elements in Churchill’s war leadership. Another aspect was his understanding of the reality of war. He had no illusions about the dangers war posed both to the fighting men and to the civilians on all sides. That knowledge made his war leadership more humane and more sensitive. In one of his early letters to his wife, written within a year of their marriage in 1908, he wrote: “Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.” During the First World War he had sought to devise policies that would minimize suffering on the battlefield. He had planned the Dardanelles campaign as a means to end the terrible stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front and to bring the war to a speedier conclusion. He had opposed what he described as Britain’s “futile offensives” on the Western Front in 1917, which had culminated in the bloody slaughter at Passchendaele.
During the Second World War Churchill was equally concerned about the human cost of the conflict, and not only to the Allies. At Chequers, after watching a short Royal Air Force film of the bombing of a German city, he commented to those present, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” But he had no doubt that the war had to be fought; that the struggle was between the forces of democracy and human decency on the one hand and tyranny and dictatorship on the other.
No single aspect of Churchill’s war leadership was more intricate and more difficult than Britain’s relationship with the United States. The burden of this association fell on his shoulders. When Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, President Roosevelt had opened up a secret correspondence with him and had shown a genuine concern for the fate of Britain, but Churchill knew that American neutrality—enshrined in the formal legislation of successive Neutrality Acts—and the isolationist pressures that had beset Roosevelt since his first presidential electoral victory in 1933 were barriers to aid from the United States on the scale required.
In the disastrous summer of 1940, with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk (accompanied by a massive loss of equipment) and with the intensification of German bombing of factories and airfields throughout Britain, Churchill and those in the inner circle of government knew the precise details of Britain’s weakness on land,