• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Here was one of the foremost principles of wartime leadership which Churchill got profoundly right, yet he often erred in implementation. He perceived that there must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved. Attlee said later, very shrewdly: “He was always, in effect215, asking himself … ‘What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable?’ … He was always looking around for ‘finest hours,’ and if one was not immediately available, his impulse was to manufacture one.”

Churchill addressed the conduct of strategy with a confidence that dismayed many of his commanders, but which had evolved over a lifetime. As early as 1909, he wrote to Clementine about Britain’s generals: “These military men v[er]y often fail216 altogether to see the simple truths underlying the relationship of all armed forces … Do you know I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgement on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations.” While he was travelling to America in 1932, Clementine read G. F. R. Henderson’s celebrated biography of Stonewall Jackson. She wrote to her husband: “The book is full of abuse of politicians217 who try to interfere with Generals in the field—(Ahem!).” Her exclamation was prompted, of course, by memories of his battles with the service chiefs during the First World War.

Churchill believed himself exceptionally fitted for the direction of armies, navies and air forces. He perceived no barrier to such a role in the fact that he possessed neither military staff training nor experience of higher field command. He wrote in his own history of the First World War:

A series of absurd conventions became established218, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The general no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the admiral upon how to fight his ships … But outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist, was equally required … Clear leadership, violent action, rigid decision one way or the other, form the only path not only of victory, but of safety and even of mercy. The State cannot afford division or hesitation at the executive centre.

Tensions between his instincts and the judgements of Britain’s professional commanders would characterise Churchill’s leadership. A Polish officer, attending a lecture at the British staff college on principles of war, rose at its conclusion to suggest that the speaker had omitted the most important: “Be stronger.” Yet where might Britain achieve this? As minister of defence, Churchill issued an important directive. Limitations of numbers, he said, “make it impossible for the Army, except in resisting invasion, to play a primary role in the defeat of the enemy. That task can only be done by the staying power of the Navy and above all by the effect of Air predominance. Very valuable and important services may be rendered Overseas by the Army in operations of a secondary order, and it is for these special operations that its organization and character should be adapted.” After a British commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, Churchill wrote to the C-in-C Home Fleet: “I am so glad you were able to find the means219 of executing ‘Claymore.’ This admirable raid has done serious injury to the enemy and has given an immense amount of innocent pleasure at home.” The latter proposition was more plausible than the former.

Churchill and his military chiefs renounced any prospect of engaging Hitler’s main army. They committed themselves to a strategy based on minor operations which persisted, in