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to hear that Wavell wanted to evacuate Tobruk. This was militarily rational, for the port’s logistic value was small, yet seemed politically intolerable. In April Churchill had described Wavell in a broadcast as “that fine commander whom we cheered257 in good days and will back through bad.” Now, on June 20, he sacked the Middle East C-in-C, exchanging him with Sir Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C India, whose seizure of Iraq had been executed with impressive efficiency. Wavell was given the Delhi command only because Churchill feared that to consign him to oblivion would play poorly with the public, to whom the general had been represented as a hero.

Clementine Churchill once wrote contemptuously to her husband about the deposed Middle East C-in-C: “I understand he has a great deal258 of personal charm. This is pleasant in civilized times but not much use in total War …” Too many of the British Army’s senior officers were agreeable men who lacked the killer instinct indispensable to victory. Wavell’s best biographer, Ronald Lewin259, has observed that he seemed destined for greatness in any field save that of high command in battle. It might more brutally be suggested that there was less to Wavell than his enigmatic persona led admirers to suppose. He once said to Pownall, “My trouble is that I am not really interested in war.”260 This was a surprisingly common limitation among Britain’s senior soldiers. It goes far to explain why Winston Churchill was much better suited to his own role than were some of his generals to theirs.

2. The War Machine

IT IS SOMETIMES suggested that in the Second World War there was none of the mistrust and indeed hostility between generals and politicians, “brass” and “frocks,” which characterised the British high command in the 1914–18 conflict. This is untrue. Ironside, when he was CIGS in 1939, remarked contemptuously to a staff officer as he set out for a War Cabinet meeting, “Now I’m going to waste a morning261 educating these old gentlemen on their job.” Though Churchill was not then prime minister, he was categorised among the despised “old gentlemen.”

Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall wrote of Churchill’s Cabinet, “They are a pretty fair lot of gangsters262 some of them—Bevin, Morrison and above all Beaverbrook who has got one of the nastiest faces I ever saw on any man.” John Kennedy wrote later in the war: “It is a bad feature of the present situation263, that there is such a rift between the politicians and the services. Winston certainly does not keep his team pulling happily in harness together. It is very wrong of him to keep abusing the services—the cry is taken up by other politicians & it is bad for the Service advisers to be made to feel ashamed of their uniforms.”

Yet the evidence of events suggests that the prime minister’s criticisms of his soldiers were well merited. The shortcomings of the wartime British Army will be addressed below. Here, it will only be remarked that Churchill’s machinery for directing the war effort was much more impressive than the means for implementing its decisions on the battlefield. The War Cabinet was Britain’s principal policy-making body, regularly attended by the Chiefs of Staff as well as by its own eight members—in 1941 Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Bevin, Wood, Beaverbrook, Greenwood and Sir John Anderson. Some four hundred committees and subcommittees, of varying membership and importance, devolved from it. Service business was addressed by the Chiefs at their own gatherings, usually in Churchill’s absence. Of 391 Chiefs of Staff meetings in 1941, Churchill presided at only 23, whereas he chaired 97 of 111 meetings of the War Cabinet. He also conducted 60 out of 69 meetings of its Defence Committee’s operational group, and 12 out of 13 meetings of its supply group.

Formalities were always maintained, with the prime minister addressing ministers and commanders by their titles rather than names. On Churchill’s bad days, his subordinates were appalled by his intemperance and irrationality. But on his good ones—and what an astonishing number of these there