Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [1]
Yet much remains opaque, because he wished it thus. Always mindful of his role as a stellar performer upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after May 10, 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity. Within months of his ascent to the premiership, however, he told his staff4 that he had already schemed the chapters of the book which he would write as soon as the war was over. The outcome was a ruthlessly partial six-volume work which is poor history, if sometimes peerless prose. We shall never know with complete confidence what he thought about many personalities—for instance Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Brooke, King George VI, his Cabinet colleagues—because he took good care not to tell us.
Churchill’s wartime relationship with the British people was much more complex than is often acknowledged. Few denied his claims upon the premiership. But between the end of the Battle of Britain in 1940 and El Alamein in November 1942, not only many ordinary citizens, but also some of his closest colleagues wanted operational control of the war machine to be removed from his hands, and some other figure appointed to his role as minister of defence. It is hard to overstate the embarrassment and even shame of the British people, as they perceived the Russians playing a heroic part in the struggle against Nazism, while their own army seemed incapable of winning a battle. To understand Britain’s wartime experience, it appears essential to recognise, as some narratives do not, the sense of humiliation which afflicted Britain amid the failures of its soldiers, contrasted—albeit often on the basis of wildly false information—with the achievements of Stalin.
Churchill was dismayed by the performance of the British Army, even after victories began to come at the end of 1942. Himself a hero, he expected others likewise to show themselves heroes. In 1940, the people of Britain, together with their navy and air force, wonderfully fulfilled his hopes. Thereafter, however, much of the story of Britain’s part in the war seems to me that of the prime minister seeking more from his nation’s warriors than they could deliver. The failure of the army to match the prime minister’s aspirations is among the central themes of this book.
Much discussion of Britain’s military effort in World War II focuses upon Churchill’s relationship with his generals. In my view, this preoccupation is overdone. The difficulties of fighting the Germans and Japanese went much deeper than could be solved by changes of commanders. The British were beaten again and again between 1940 and 1942, and continued to suffer battlefield difficulties thereafter, in consequence of failures of tactics, weapons, equipment and culture even more significant than lack of mass or inspired leadership. The gulf between Churchillian aspiration and reality extended to the peoples of occupied Europe, hence his faith in “setting Europe ablaze” through the agency of Special Operations Executive, which had malign consequences that he failed to anticipate. SOE armed some occupied peoples to fight more energetically against one another in 1944–45 than they had done earlier against the Germans.
It is a common mistake to suppose that those who bestrode the stage during momentous times were giants, set apart from the personalities of our own humdrum society. I have argued in earlier books that we should instead see 1939–45 as a period when men and women not much different