Cooking the books

Churchill conceded that the ultimate verdict on his conduct of the second world war would have to be left to the judgment of history. But, as a precaution he resolved to write that history himself. The result was the six volumes and nearly two million words of The Second World War published between 1948 and 1954.

David Reynolds, in the relatively short space of 527 pages of text, now gives us a detailed, Gospel-commentary-style analysis of this mammoth work. His purpose is to judge the extent to which Churchill has succeeded in providing the judgment of history upon his own achievement — how far he has, in fact, commanded history by writing about the fighting which he also sought to command. In the concluding passage of his book, Reynolds tells us that Churchill dominated the field for a quarter of a century ‘through speeches and deeds in warfare and, even more, by what he wrote afterwards’. Churchill, he claims, ‘remains in command of history’. This, however, is a claim too far.

We know, for example, that Churchill foresaw that air support on the battlefield would add a complication without an advantage, that the Germans would be unable to break the French on the western front, that the Japanese would be too cautious to enter the war and that, if they did, Singapore would remain invulnerable. We know he foresaw that neither submarine nor aircraft would pose a serious threat to battleships and that aerial mines would be a more effective means of air defence than radar. We know that his was the chief responsibility for the disastrous Norwegian campaign in 1940, the despatch of the Prince of Wales and Repulse to Singapore in 1942, that he ordered the bombing of Dresden and then condemned it and that, on the eve of victory in Europe, he asked the chiefs of staff to prepare plans for an attack on the Red Army in alliance with the Germans.