No reason to pull down the statue

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The title of Gordon Corrigan’s book tells us it is not going to be a Churchillian panegyric, so it comes as almost a disappointment to find no new revelations needful for the dethroning of the former national hero. All we are given is an emphasised reminder that Churchill’s history, The Second World War, was biased, that he was prone to indulge in disastrous expeditions, notably, in the first war, Gallipoli and, in the second, Norway and that he unreasonably pestered his generals to mount offensives before they were ready to do so. But none of this, of course, is news and it certainly gives no ground for taking down the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square nor, indeed, for revising his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. It is, therefore, fortunate that there is more to Corrigan’s book than the establishment of the obvious.

He tells the story of how Britain threw away her arms in 1919, failed to replace them and consequently found herself in desperate straits when Hitler put his head over the parapet less than 20 years later.

True, this story has been told many times before but it gains substantially from this retelling of it. Perhaps through the process of filtering and reconsideration, some of the key episodes are made clearer than they seemed to be before. For example, the steps by which the Royal Navy was reduced from a position of pre-eminence to one of competitiveness and those by which Hitler rose to power are in both cases brilliantly described and lucidly explained. Corrigan also peppers his narrative with an engrossing array of military knowledge such as, for example, that today’s infantryman carries about 60 pounds weight of equipment on his back, which is the same as that carried by his predecessors in the second world war, the first world war and, indeed, in all wars for the past 2,000 years or more.