Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [9]
In May 1940, while few influential figures24 questioned Churchill’s brilliance or oratorical genius, they perceived his career as wreathed in misjudgements. Robert Rhodes James subtitled his biography of Churchill before he ascended to the premiership A Study in Failure. As early as 1914, the historian A. G. Gardiner wrote an extraordinarily shrewd and admiring assessment, which concluded equivocally: “‘Keep your eye on Churchill’25 should be the watchword of these days. Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always. He will write his name big on our future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.”
Now, amid the crisis precipitated by Hitler’s blitzkrieg, Churchill’s contemporaries could not forget that he had been wrong about much even in the recent past, and even in the military sphere in which he professed expertise. During the approach to war, he described the presence of aircraft over the battlefield as a mere “additional complication.”26 He claimed that modern antitank weapons neutered the powers of “the poor tank,”27 and that “the submarine will be mastered28 … There will be losses, but nothing to affect the scale of events.” On Christmas Day 1939, he wrote to Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord: “I feel we may compare the position29 now very favourably with that of 1914.” He had doubted that the Germans would invade Scandinavia. When they did so, Churchill told the Commons on April 11: “In my view, which is shared by my skilled advisers, Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north … We shall take all we want of this Norwegian coast now, with an enormous increase in the facility and the efficiency of our blockade.” Even if some of Churchill’s false prophecies and mistaken expressions of confidence were unknown to the public, they were common currency among ministers and commanders.
His claim upon his country’s leadership rested not upon his contribution to the war since September 1939, which was equivocal, but upon his personal character and his record as a foe of appeasement. He was a warrior to the roots of his soul, who found his being upon battlefields. He was one of the few British prime ministers to have killed men with his own hand—at Omdurman in 1898. Now, he wielded a sword symbolically, if no longer physically, amid a body politic dominated by men of paper, creatures of committees and conference rooms. “It may well be,”30 he enthused, six years before the war, “that the most glorious chapters of our history have yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.” Leo Amery had written back in March 1940: “I am beginning to come round31 to the idea that Winston with all his failings is the one man with real war drive and love of battle.” So he was, of course. But widespread fears persisted that this erratic genius might lead Britain in a rush towards military disaster.
Few of the ministers whom he invited to join his all-party coalition were equal to the magnitude of their tasks. If this is true of all governments at all times, it was notably unfortunate now. Twenty-one out of thirty-six senior officeholders were, like Halifax, David Margesson, Kingsley Wood and Chamberlain himself, veterans of the previous discredited administration. “Winston has not been nearly bold32 enough with his changes and is much too afraid of the [Conservative] Party,” wrote Amery, who had led the Commons charge against Chamberlain.
Of the Labour recruits—notably Clement Attlee, A. V. Alexander, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Greenwood and Ernest Bevin—only Bevin was a personality of the first rank, though