Concentrating on sideshows

It is becoming difficult to say anything new about Churchill as a war leader. The basic facts about the conduct of allied strategy have been known for many years. Diaries and memoirs, and the occasional loose anecdote, still dribble into the public domain, adding spice but nothing fundamental to our knowledge. What remains is analysis and opinion, and even that is a crowded field.

Max Hastings’ Churchill as Warlord, 1940-45 covers, within a narrower chronological frame, the same ground as Carlo d’Este’s recent book, Warlord: Churchill at War, 1874-1945. Hastings’ views are a good deal more balanced than d’Este’s, as well as being better researched and argued. But the essential point made by both authors is the same. Churchill’s role in enabling Britain to survive as a belligerent between the fall of France and the entry of Russia and the United States into the war, was indispensable and would probably have been beyond any one else. But his conduct of strategy was erratic, prejudiced and misguided.

The main issue, about which argument has ebbed to and fro since 1940, is Churchill’s unwillingness to confront the German army directly by invading western Europe across the Channel. He preferred sideshows which offered spectacle and movement but could never be decisive: North Africa, Dieppe, the Balkans and the Aegean, Italy, Sumatra, and the great number of strategically trivial adventures promoted by the Special Operations Executive. These strategic judgments, as Churchill’s enemies pointed out, were of a piece with those which had inspired the most disastrous sideshow of all, namely the Gallipoli campaign which had almost destroyed his career during the first world war.

In fact, as Max Hastings argues, Churchill’s obduracy on this point was not entirely misguided. It saved the Allies from an ill-conceived and premature attempt to invade France in 1943, which would certainly have ended in disaster.