Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [312]
As he left Chequers after a final weekend with his family and intimates, he wrote in its visitors’ book: “FINIS.” Three weeks later, on August 15, Japan’s surrender brought an end to the Second World War.
Churchill had wielded more power than any other British prime minister had known, or would know again. In 1938, he seemed a man out of his time, a patrician imperialist whose vision was rooted in Britain’s Victorian past. By 1945, while this remained true, and goes far to explain his own disappointments, it had not prevented him from becoming the greatest war leader his country had ever known, a statesman whose name rang across the world like that of no other Englishman in history. Himself believing Britain great, for one last brief season he was able to make her so. To an extraordinary degree, what he did between 1940 and 1945 defines the nation’s self-image even into the twenty-first century.
His achievement was to exercise the privileges of a dictator without casting off the mantle of a democrat. Ismay once found him bemoaning the bother of preparing a speech for the House of Commons, and obviously apprehensive about its reception. The soldier said emolliently: “Why don’t you tell them to go to hell?”1128 Churchill turned in a flash: “You should not say those things: I am the servant of the House.” General Sikorski remarked at Chequers that the prime minister was a dictator chosen by the people. Churchill corrected him: “No, I am a privileged domestic1129, a valet de chambre, the servant of the House of Commons.” It should be a source of wonder and pride that such a man led Britain through the war, more than half believing this. It was entirely appropriate that he led a coalition government, for he was never a party man. He existed, sui generis, outside the framework of conventional politics, and never seemed any more comfortable with the Conservative Party than it was with him. A. G. Gardiner wrote of Churchill back in 1914: “He would no more think of consulting a party1130 than the chauffeur would of consulting the motor car.” The same was true in 1945.
As for Churchill’s war direction, it is not difficult to identify his strategic errors and misplaced enthusiasms. Anatole France wrote, “Après la bataille, c’est là que triomphent les tacticiens.” Yet the outcome justified all. The defining fact of Churchill’s leadership was Britain’s emergence from the Second World War among the victors. This, most of his own people acknowledged. No warlord, no commander in history has failed to make mistakes. As Tedder observed, “War is organised confusion.” It is as easy to catalogue the mistakes of Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon as it is those of Churchill. Both Britain’s most distinguished earlier war leaders, Pitt the Elder and Younger, were responsible for graver strategic follies than himself.
Historians and biographers have a duty to present evidence for the prosecution, to identify blunders and shortcomings. But before the jury retires, it is necessary to strip away nugatory matter, and focus upon essentials. Churchill towers over the war, standing higher than any other single human being at the head of the forces of light, as many Americans recognised. Mark Sullivan wrote in the New York Herald Tribune on May 11, 1945: “Churchill’s greatness is unexcelled … Churchill’s part in this world war reduces the classic figures of Rome and Greece to the relatively inconsequent stature of actors in dramas of minor scope … Churchill was the fighting leader, and his own poet.” Anyone who attempts the difficult feat of imagining British wartime history deprived of his presence will find it sadly shrunken in stature. Even Brooke was once moved to complain, “Dull cabinet without PM.”1131 To an extraordinary degree, one man raised his nation far above the place in the Grand Alliance which its contribution in troops, tanks, ships and planes could have justified from 1943 onwards. It is a mistake to assess Churchill’s war leadership in isolation. When it is measured against that of