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By Root 867 0

companions. Few generals are highly cultured men or notable conversationalists, capable of illuminating a conference room or dinner table to Churchill’s standard. In his peacetime life, even after the two world wars, old warhorses played little part. Many people supposed that he himself would have coveted a Victoria Cross. This was surely true in his youth. But when his daughter Mary asked in his old age whether he felt that anything was missing from his wondrous array of laurels, he said nothing of medals, but instead answered slowly: “I should have liked my father1133 to have lived long enough to see that I made something of my life.”

During the war years, his commanders far more often disappointed his hopes than fulfilled them. He was forever searching for great captains, Marlboroughs and Wellingtons, yet towards the end he grew impatient even with Alexander, his unworthy favourite. He valued both Brooke and Montgomery, but never warmed to them, save as instruments of his will. Neither the British Army nor its chieftains fulfilled his soaring warrior ideal, and it was never plausible that they should. Much of the story of Churchill and the Second World War is of Britain’s leader seeking from his nation’s torpid military culture greater things than it was capable of achieving. He inspired it to accomplish more than it dreamed possible in June 1940, but never as much as he wanted. Such is the nature of the relationship between many great leaders and their peoples, who know themselves mortal clay. Had Britain—or America—produced legions of warriors such as those of wartime Germany and Japan, they would have ceased to be the kind of liberal democracies the war was fought to preserve.

If Churchill’s rhetoric and personality had been less remarkable, if he himself had not been so lovable, some of his military decisions might have been more harshly judged both by his contemporaries and by posterity. As it was, he was able to weave spells in the House of Commons and in his writings, which deflected even the best-merited criticisms. The only charge against him which stuck with the public, and lost him the general election of 1945, derived from his indifference to forging a new society. Moran wrote in 1943: “With Winston war is an end in itself rather than a means to an end.” The British people understood his indifference to humdrum domestic issues, and thus acted as sensibly in evicting Churchill from Downing Street in 1945 as they had done by supporting his installation there in 1940.

Macmillan was at least half right in asserting that only Churchill could have secured the commitment of American power to the Mediterranean and Europe in the year following Pearl Harbor. Without his personal influence, the lure of the Pacific might have proved irresistible to Roosevelt and his Chiefs of Staff. If the Americans in 1944–45 came to regret their engagement in the Mediterranean, in 1942–43 it is impossible to perceive how else the Western Allies’ armies could have played some part in fighting Hitler’s armies.

There is an escapable pathos about Churchill’s predicament in the last year of the war, because almost all his ambitions were frustrated, save for victory over the Axis. His engagement with armies became almost exclusively that of a tourist, because he could no longer much influence their movements. For such a mighty warrior, this was a source of unhappiness. The limits to his powers of negotiation with Roosevelt and Stalin were set by economic and strategic realities. But he accomplished the little that a British leader could.

Churchill’s view of the British Empire and its peoples was unenlightened by comparison with that of America’s president, or even by the standards of his time. This must be set in the balance against his huge virtues. He excluded brown and black peoples from his personal vision of freedom. Yet almost all of us are discriminatory, not necessarily racially, in the manner and degree in which we focus our finite stores of compassion. In this as in many other things, Churchill displayed mortal fallibility.