Layout 8 - Winston Churchill

elieves that Churchill’s behavior at the
Admiralty revealed many of the personal
failings that earned him a
reputation of instability—rushing into
action without thinking of the consequences,
as in his attempt to relieve
Antwerp early in the war (though he
was sent there to—and did—prolong
the city’s defense). Churchill forced his
views on his professional staff, Holmes
says, rejecting their advice when it
didn’t match his views. All these failures
drove him from office. (There are
of course plentiful arguments against
this fairly conventional view.)
Holmes adds that impetuosity,
stubbornness and aggressiveness were
to serve Churchill well in 1940. His
chapters on 1940-41, when Britain
stood alone against the German
onslaught, are among his best. Holmes
shows that the PM actually enjoyed
himself, despite the desperate crisis
confronting him. When asked late in
life what year he would want to relive,
Churchill always replied, “1940.”
Without Churchill, Holmes concludes,
Britain would have lost the war,
or at least signed a negotiated peace
leading to domination by Germany. As
John Lukacs points out in his Five Days
in London, May 1940, Churchill brilliantly
outmaneuvered the appeasers in
Cabinet, and brought them around to
his view that they must fight on.
In one of his most insightful
observations Holmes shows that the
defeatism that surfaced in those dangerous
days of May and June 1940 was
not confined to right-wing reactionaries,
but was in fact shared by
what Holmes labels “the strident antipatriotism
of the left.”
Holmes’ chapters on Churchill’s
role during the last years of World War
II are not impressive. Like D’Este, he
believes that Churchill was frustrated
when he lost control of the war to the
Americans. Perhaps, he writes, some of
Churchill’s actions in these years—like
his emphasis on the Mediterranean—
were taken to convince the Americans
that Britain still counted. But this is
too pat an explanation of a complicated
subject, which has been debated
for decades (including in these pages),
and will continue to be.
John Ramsden, Man of the
Century: Winston Churchill and His
Legend Since 1945 (London:
HarperCollins, 2002; New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004);
now available in paperback.
Two more books which fascinate
students are the studies of Churchill’s
postwar reputation, providing examples
of how Churchill continues to attract
young people today. The late John
Ramsden’s unique work, if my students
are any guide, is one of the best ever
written about WSC.
Ramsden was fascinated by the
growth of the Churchill legend in the
years after the Second World War and
how WSC projected that image
throughout the English-speaking
world. His book explains how WSC
dealt with his election defeat in 1945,
patiently rebuilding his reputation
through his writings and speeches.
Ramsden divides the Churchill
revival into three parts: the seizure of
leadership of the anti-communist
movement through his Iron Curtain
speech at Fulton in 1946; the promotion
of European unity; and, of course,
his heroic reputation as the defiant
World War II leader.
Ramsden has dredged up many
little-known facts. It was none other
than Lord Halifax, he reveals, who
helped refine Churchill’s Fulton speech
to make it palatable to an American
public that had not yet lost its admiration
for the Russian war effort. And it
was with marked surprise that
Europeans heard the old warrior at
Zurich that same year, arguing for
Franco-German rapprochement: “we
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must re-create the European family in a
regional structure called…the United
States of Europe.” Nor did Churchill
exclude Russia; at heart he was an
Atlanticist. Nevertheless, he considered
the Anglo-American relationship
supreme. “Each time we have to choose
between Europe and the open sea,” he
told Charles de Gaulle, “we shall
always choose the open sea.” (To
Britain’s disadvantage later, de Gaulle
took this quite literally.)
Churchill’s ultimate claim to
mythic status, John Ramsden argues,
still rests on World War II. He had
been right about Nazism, and he was
determined to prove it through his
memoirs, which were at their peak, still
unfinished, when Time proclaimed him
“Man of the Half-Century” and the
Nobel Committee awarded him its
prize in Literature.
David Reynolds, In Command of
History: Churchill Fighting and
Writing the Second World War (New
York & London Penguin, 2004), now
in paperback and Kindle.
David Reynolds’ book is the
most original of the above two works,
taking up Churchill’s six-volume
memoir, The Second World War,
explaining how he wrote it, the structure
he imposed on events, and the way
in which he carried out his research. In
a clever aside, Reynolds notes that
Churchill fought the war twice—first
as a wartime Prime Minister and secondly
as the war’s first significant
chronicler.
Churchill, Reynolds says, was
prompted to vindicate his role in >>