Churchill at war

BRITAIN'S war leader of the 1940s, Winston Churchill, was a man of contrasts: a master of the stirring phrase and of wild misjudgment; a democrat unable to see that Britain's colonial subjects deserved democracy too; a has-been (even, at times, in his own eyes) for years, and then, suddenly, in 1940, the only credible prime minister; deeply distrusted for most of his career by other politicians, inspirer of intense loyalty among his overworked staff; decisive, yet a poor manager of his cabinet; far-sighted and effective in his view and practice of global diplomacy, stubbornly wrong-headed at times about military strategy; winner of the most crucial war in Britain's history, only, as he wrote bitterly in his memoirs, even before it was over to be “immediately dismissed [in the mid-1945 election] by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs”.

In his youth, in India, Sudan and the Boer war, Churchill had been a daring officer and war correspondent (both together, at times). The first world war showed him, first lord of the Admiralty (navy minister) from 1911 to May 1915, at his worst. As The Economist, no admirer of his jingoism at the time, recorded in September 1914:

On Monday Mr Churchill declared that “if the German fleet did not come out and fight, they would be dug out like rats in a hole.” The following morning a flotilla of German submarines, unfortunately, responded to the challenge and surprised three of our large armoured cruisers... Within two hours all three had gone down.
Far worse, in 1915 he—as much as anyone, though not alone—was to inspire the landing on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula, a typically Churchillian sideshow that ended wretchedly for navy and army (notably, many Australians and New Zealanders) alike.



He was to be proved entirely right in his distrust of Hitler's Germany in the 1930s. Yet those earlier events were curiously paralleled in the second world war: two British capital ships, without air cover, sunk by Japanese aircraft within days of Pearl Harbour; an expeditionary force—diplomatically honourable, militarily mad—sent to Greece in 1940; later, Churchill's remarkable belief that the long, often mountainous, Italian peninsula was “the soft underbelly of the Axis”. At times, he drove his military chiefs to despair: how was the war to be won with a man of such random, impish, headstrong energy in charge?

No real answer, but a fair one, as they knew, was that, without him, in 1940-41 it might well have been lost.


Courtesy :  The Economist