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focused more on their exclusion from influence than on specific policies. But Churchill was careful not to abuse the power he had accrued. Reflecting on his new-found authority, he wrote, almost a decade later: “Power, for the sake of lording it over fellow-creatures or adding to personal pomp, is rightly judged base. But power in a national crisis, when a man believes he knows what orders should be given, is a blessing.” Twenty-five years earlier, when he had been forced out of office during the Dardanelles campaign, Churchill had written to his wife, “God for a month of power—and a good shorthand writer.” In 1940 he had both power and good shorthand writers; and he was to be Prime Minister not for a month but for almost five years.

Central to Churchill’s war leadership was his concept of the offensive: the need, as he saw it, to attack whenever possible, even when being attacked. The bombing offensive against Germany was a case in point: in its early stages it was relatively ineffective, and yet, from Churchill’s perspective, it constituted something that could be done, and could be seen to be done, to show that Britain did not have to sit back and accept whatever Germany might throw against it. In December 1939, while still at the Admiralty, Churchill had written to a War Cabinet colleague with regard to his own much postponed plan to drop aerial mines into the River Rhine to disrupt German military barge traffic: “The offensive is three or four times as hard as passively enduring from day to day. It therefore requires all possible help in early stages. Nothing is easier than to smother it in the cradle. Yet here perhaps lies safety.” That same month Churchill wrote to the First Sea Lord: “An absolute defensive is for weaker forces,” and he added: “I could never be responsible for a naval strategy which excluded the offensive principle.” He was delighted—“I purred like six cats,” he later recalled—when General Wavell sent him a plan for an attack in the Western Desert in November 1940: “At long last we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive,” he told General Ismay, and added: “Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.”

Anything that smacked of passivity on the part of his army commanders incurred Churchill’s wrath. Learning at the beginning of November 1941 that nothing “large” was being planned against the German and Italian forces in the Western Desert by Wavell’s successor, Churchill wrote to his former Boer War adversary, General Smuts, then a respected voice in Allied military circles: “I dread the idea of this long delay, when, as we know for certain, the enemy is hard pressed for supplies and would be greatly embarrassed by making exertions.” He continued: “In war one cannot wait to have everything perfect, but must fight in relation to the enemy’s strength and plight. I am appalled at the proposal to remain passive all this time, when the golden opportunity may be lost.” Later, Churchill was to summarize this feeling in a terse comment: “The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter—‘Paralysis.’”

Churchill’s military advisers did not always see his keenness for action as a virtue. In September 1942, during the North African campaign, General Sir Alan Brooke noted in his diary: “It is a regular disease that he suffers from, this frightful impatience to get an attack launched.” But it was an essential feature of his war leadership, and one that enabled him to drive forward the whole machinery of war-making.

In both the military and political spheres, Churchill dreaded prevarication when the need for decisive action seemed to him imperative. In May 1944, confronted by an Anglo-American dispute over how to agree on the role of the Soviet Union in Romania and Greece, he feared that only Stalin would be the beneficiary of Anglo-American hesitations. When Roosevelt suggested the establishment of “consultative machinery” between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, Churchill replied: “I am much concerned