Churchill at War

Anthony Tucker-Jones: Churchill Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895-1945. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2021.

 

As the dates Tucker-Jones puts in the title of his book suggests, Winston Churchill was at war, in one sense or another, for most of his adult life. He never initiated a war but he fought—first as a soldier, then as a civilian—in most of the many wars his country engaged in during the last half-century of the empire Victoria had ruled, an empire upon which the sun never set and the dust never settled. Churchill fought his wars with a boldness bordering on recklessness; on Aristotle’s continuum of virtue, whereby courage lies between the extremes of cowardice and rashness, he placed himself on the middle-right of the equation as “one of the greatest military and political chancers of all time.” “On occasion he gambled and lost spectacularly,” but when he finally walked out of the casino his pockets were far from empty. A man of supreme spiritedness, “quite simply he loved to be in the thick of it.” And if “throughout his long life he was drawn to the sound of the guns like a moth to a flame,” it must be said that he never flew right into it, only getting his wings and antennae singed on occasion. The same can be said for the British Empire through the end of the Second World War. As the Brits would say, it was often a near thing, but never a fatal thing. 

The young man enlisted in the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars in 1895. Bored, he arranged approval to go to Cuba as an “observer” to the conflict in which Cubans were fighting against the weakening Spanish Empire. In fine aristocratic fashion, his mother pulled strings so he could write reports for a London newspaper—an opportunity to make money and a name for himself. He found himself sympathetic to the rebels’ cause but critical of their lack of discipline; while the Spanish troops did have discipline, they lacked energy. He was “dismayed” to see Spanish officers fail to order close pursuit of “the retreating rebels.” What Tucker-Jones doesn’t mention is Churchill’s suggestion, in one of his published articles, that the British might take over the island, a notion that may have attracted the unfavorable attention of another young chancer, Theodore Roosevelt, who took an early disliking to the British adventurer. Back in London, the men who had signed off on Churchill’s foray “soon regretted” it, as “the Spanish government expressed its displeasure” with Churchillian journalism to the British ambassador in Madrid. 

This hardly fazed our intrepid reporter. Returning home, he didn’t stay for long, next wangling two trips to India with a promise from Lord Kitchener to put his name on the list for a commission with the British expeditionary force in Egypt sandwiched in between. In his first Indian adventure he joined “the aptly-named Brigadier-General Sir Bindon Blood,” again as a news correspondent, in a punitive mission against Indian rebels at Malakand. “He saw more fighting than I expected,” Sir Bindon recalled, “and very hard fighting too!” Out of this, Churchill wrote not only newspaper articles but his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Planning a political career, he understood that it wasn’t enough only to act but to think and to write. That, along with an exceptionally kind Providence, saved him from ruin and prepared him for statesmanship. Yes, he was building a reputation, but he was also building a storehouse of well-considered experiences, the foundation of intelligent practice in the future, when he would take charge of the next generation of Bloods.

Kitchener was unhappy at having his arm twisted to accept Churchill, “not only because of his lack of commitment to his military career, but also because he had pulled political strings to get there.” And he didn’t care for the prying eyes of a young lieutenant who could be counted on to publish judgments on his superior’s conduct of the campaign. For his part, Churchill “wanted to take part in the historic recapture of Khartoum,” which he did. In so doing, he “narrowly escaped death” on several occasions “and felt that glory was calling,” not only to himself but to his country, as “this and his earlier escapades in India gave him an unshakable faith in the country’s prowess on the battlefield.” True, “he had finally overplayed his hand” in his self-conceived role as soldier-journalist. “Kitchener was stung by Churchill’s very public criticism of his conduct” of the campaign and the War Office decreed “that serving officers were not to write for the press.” No less a personage than the Prince of Wales weighed in with a rebuke. It must be said that posterity has reaped the greatest benefit from this affair: Churchill’s superb book, The River War. His previous book had been an adventure story; this one teaches lessons in geopolitics. True, “Kitchener and his circle of friends scoffed at the notion of Churchill as some sort of self-appointed military expert,” but technical expertise wasn’t what Churchill or his readers, then and now, need. They have needed a sense of military and political strategy, and that is what Churchill teaches them. Churchill resigned his army commission in May 1899, having calculated that even a brief (if well-publicized) military career would prove a useful entrée to politics. The voters were less impressed; he lost his first parliamentary election. 

Churchill solved this problem by returning to the wars, this time as a journalist simply, in South Africa. There, the Boers, Dutch settlers who resented ever-increasing British imperial encroachments, had already fought one war against their rivals in the early 1880s. But by the 1890s, British gold-seekers had begun to outnumber the Boers in Transvaal and in 1899 the Second Boer War began. “If [Churchill] was to get a book out of this trip he needed to have some adventures. If that meant having some close shaves as always that was a price he was prepared to pay.” That’s what happened. He got caught in an ambush, escaped, wrote a thrilling account of it, and returned (after witnessing and writing about several other battles) to a hero’s welcome in England. “The Churchill legend had begun to gather momentum”; “by the age of 25 he was known worldwide.” This time, he won that seat in Parliament, from which vantage point he saw the eventual, costly, British victory over the Boers. 

Not allowing his newfound fame to go to waste, Churchill “skipped the opening of Parliament,” delaying his maiden speech until mid-May of 1901, rather unprophetically inveighing against “military expenditure and talk of war in Europe.” Three years later, he switched from the Conservative to the Liberal Party and was rewarded with the post of Undersecretary of State for the Colonies in 1905. “He would learn the vast Empire was not strategically or politically integrated and remained wholly reliant on the Royal Navy to defend it.” Appointed to the office of Home Secretary in 1910, he developed an appetite for information provided reformed Secret Service, now divided into an intelligence gathering service (MI6) and a counterintelligence service (MI5). He read evidence showing that German agents were studying the British and their empire with “minute and scientific” precision. He revised his opinion of German intentions and of the need for British military preparedness accordingly and, having already understood the indispensable role of the Navy in imperial defense, he won appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911. “The Navy prospered under Churchill, with him overseeing the impressive Dreadnought battleship program, building up the Royal Navy Air Service and introducing a naval staff for the very first time.” Great Britain would need these resources in the conflagration that began in 1914.

Although Churchill had served in the Army and ran the Navy, he had yet fully to attend to the need to coordinate the two branches in combined operations. This contributed to the calamitous defeat in the 1915 attempt to assault the Dardanelles, by which he intended take pressure off the Western Front and come to the aid of the Russians in the east. “In principle, Churchill’s plan was sound; in its execution it was to prove a disaster,” being undertaken too slowly (the Turks, Germany’s allies, had time to mount defenses) and without adequate British ground support. In response to the criticisms, Churchill could only argue that he wouldn’t have “consented to naval operations in February and March had he known sufficient troops would not be available until May.” He offered his resignation, and after some hesitation, Prime Minister Asquith accepted it. “I thought then that I was finished.” He wasn’t. But he did learn that “combined operations with the army and the navy should never be run by committee. There needed to be an overall commander-in-chief with clear goals from the very start.” When the Second World War began, he saw to it that he would act as that commander.

Churchill soon volunteered for Army service in France. Appointed Lieutenant-Colonel of the Sixth Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, he overcame the soldiers’ initial skepticism of their celebrity officer, fresh from a major setback, by careful attention to their needs. His adjutant later testified, “He overlooked nothing.” His battalion saw action in Belgium in the first half of 1916, after which he returned to resume his Parliamentary seat. By 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George had replaced Asquith, and he brought Churchill into his Cabinet as Minister of Munitions. This, it should be remarked, made a great deal of sense. As a military strategist, Churchill had been discredited, however unjustly. But in his stint at the Admiralty he had shown himself an excellent administrator of military preparation and supply. Sure enough, Churchill set Army technicians to work developing tanks, which proved useful in fending off the last German offensive in 1918 and in the victorious Allied counter-offensive that followed. 

In the aftermath of the war, the Prime Minister rewarded him with the post of Secretary of State for War and Air. In this capacity, Churchill responded vigorously to the impending threat of a Communist victory in the Russian civil war, which had followed the overthrow of the Czar in 1917. “Churchill warned that Lenin and his Bolsheviks presented a far greater threat than the Kaiser and Germany ever did,” proceeding under the slogan, “Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.” Although Tucker-Jones laments that “Churchill seemed blind to the reality that the disunited Whites committed just as many appalling atrocities as the Bolsheviks,” he himself seems short-sighted in ignoring the difference in the threat to Europe from a regime of ideologues with international ambitions as distinguished from Whites, who had few if any such designs.

Churchill supported international military intervention in Russia. This “simply roused the population to support the Red Army against the Whites and the foreign invaders.” Lloyd-George was more cautious than Churchill, worrying that Britain couldn’t afford any major drain on its resources after an exhausting war in the West. In addition, he and the majority of his Cabinet blundered in returning 500,000 Russian prisoners of war who had been interned in Germany, against Churchill’s recommendation that they be re-equipped and sent to fight with the Whites. In the event, the Reds absorbed most of these soldiers into their forces, drove back the White armies and headed west toward Poland, where only a last-hour stand by the Poles in August 1920 saved Central Europe, and possibly even Germany, from Communist revolution. “Churchill felt that with a large chunk of the Red Army destroyed, now was the time for the Whites to renew their attack”; the Cabinet disagreed, British troops withdrew, and the Reds crushed the Whites. “Churchill’s attempts to help the Whites had been constantly hobbled by the Cabinet’s insistence on the withdrawal of British troops.” This suggests the thought that the intervention either should not have been launched in the first place or, having been launched, it needed vigorous and consistent Allied support. As to Churchill’s initial judgment, that Communist Russia would prove more dangerous to Great Britain and the world than Kaiser Germany, it’s hard to argue against that.

Churchill also made the right call when he insisted on maintaining the independence of the Royal Air Force against those who supposed it would be more economical to merge it with the army. In addition, he established the RAF officer training college; “this was to prove a vital decision come the summer of 1940 when pilot training was at a premium.” In a sense, the Battle of Britain was won by Churchill’s actions some twenty years beforehand.

Less successfully, Churchill attempted to direct traffic on “Ireland’s bloody road to independence and partition.” Before the war, he “moved from opposing home rule” for the Irish “to supporting it on the basis that Ireland remained under British authority,” inasmuch as an independent Ireland would break up the United Kingdom at exactly the time when Germany was preparing for war. After the war, he was no less “implacably opposed to full Irish independence,” recommending that the RAF be deployed to attack the Irish Republican Army. Less sanguinary policies prevailed, but when the Irish Republican candidates won district council elections in 1920 “a wave of political and sectarian violence” swept through the country. England may have left its religious wars behind, but Ireland had not. Churchill tried to reframe the conflict in economic terms (“If Ireland were more prosperous she would be more loyal, and if more loyal more free”); the trouble was that ‘The Troubles’ weren’t really about comfortable self-preservation. The eventual solution—the 1921 division of Ireland between the mostly Catholic south and the mostly Protestant north—never satisfied Irish Catholics, who continued to demand a united, sovereign Ireland ruled by a Catholic majority. Ireland would simmer throughout Churchill’s lifetime and well beyond it; even in World War II, the president of the Irish Republic, Eamon de Valera, himself threatened by IRA extremists, would refuse to lend much support to the hated English. For his part, Lloyd George discreetly moved Churchill off the problem, transferring him from War and Air to the post of Colonial Secretary.

There, another problem awaited him, as the aftermath of the Great War required the Allies to manage the elements of the now-dissolved Ottoman Empire. In 1921 he chaired the Cairo Conference, aiming at “ensur[ing] effective administration of Ottoman lands ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Sèvres,” signed the previous year. Churchill established Iraq and Transjordan as buffer states protecting Great Britain’s main interest in the region, the Suez Canal. In Egypt itself, nationalists encouraged by the Irish uprising posed a nearer danger. Here, he partnered with his fellow military-political celebrity T. E. Lawrence, who had practiced the same kind of guerrilla warfare in the Middle East that Churchill had seen in South Africa. Lawrence had initially hoped to see a pan-Arab state in the Middle East. But this required defining who was an Arab and who was not; a shared language could not sufficiently unite the many tribes who spoke it. “It may have pained Lawrence, but it was beholden on him to highlight to Churchill that the bulk of Arabia [against the Ottoman Turks] had not supported the rising that commenced in Mecca.” More, the treaty had granted rule over two parts of ‘Arabia,’ Lebanon and Syria, to France, a rival empire. For his part, Churchill never forgot that the jewel of the British imperial crown, India, was riven by conflicts between Muslims and Hindus, who would be watching British policy toward Arab Muslims with considerable interest. Following Lawrence’s recommendation, Churchill made the Hashemite Faisal I king of Iraq, a move that “replicated British policy with the maharajahs of India.” Unfortunately for the future of Iraq, the local tribes were never disarmed. They proceeded to threaten the monarchy rather as feudal lords had threatened the monarchs of medieval Europe. “Although a small Iraqi army was established it was mainly recruited from the Kurds,” not the Arabs. As with Ireland, this settlement didn’t really settle the matter, although it was well received in Parliament at the time. The British did retain the military power to defeat a Turkish attempt to return to Iraq, using RAF bombers to crush them. Rebellious tribes were treated to the same punishment and Iraq was pacified, for a while, by force majeure.

Lloyd George’s governing coalition dissolved the following year and Churchill himself lost his seat in the 1933 election. He returned to Parliament as an independent after winning his seat back in 1924, then rejoined the Conservative Party. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Tory government headed by Stanley Baldwin, but the worldwide economic depression at the end of the decade knocked out that administration and boosted the Labourites to power. As is well known, as a Conservative M.P. in his ‘Wilderness Years’ Churchill strongly opposed the Indian independence movement and its leader, Mohandas Gandhi, warned about British military unpreparedness in the face of Hitler’s regime and its rearmament in defiance of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and continued to inveigh against Soviet Communism, which now had as it leader a tyrant even worse than Lenin.

With such enormities looming, he understandably paid less attention to East Asia, where he “felt that Japan provided a counterweight to the dangers posed by the spread of Communism in China and the Soviet Union.” In this he was mistaken. Instead of turning north after seizing Manchuria in 1931 the Japanese rulers moved south, where the countries (including China) were much more feebly defended than the Soviet Union was. Against the Japanese invaders, the Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek was forced into alliance with Mao’s communists, over whom he had enjoyed the military edge in China’s civil war. In the end, Japan would choose the wrong side in the coming war in Europe and China would be taken by the Communists, but not before causing serious injury to British interests in the region.

Famously, in 1940 Churchill returned to high office as Prime Minister, his reprobation of the British failure to deter Hitler’s ambitions having been thoroughly vindicated. Removing the hapless Neville Chamberlain and installing the worrisome Churchill was the only way the Conservatives could hope to remain in power. Having learned in the failure of the Dardanelles campaign that winning a war requires a commander-in-chief, Churchill “created for himself the new post of Minister of Defence, thereby placing himself directly above the Chiefs of Staff,” thus taking “personal control of the war.” He did this just in time to oversee the evacuation of British and some French troops from Dunkirk, where they were about to be immolated by the German army as it swept through France to the west coast of the English Channel. “Thanks to the heroic efforts” of British officers on the ground, “Churchill narrowly avoided what would have been the worst defeat ever in British military history,” a defeat that might well have caused the collapse of his government and British capitulation to Hitler.

Instead, the Battle of Britain began, matching the Royal Air Force Churchill had fostered against the German Luftwaffe. During the German aerial blitz, Churchill “resolutely toured Britain’s bombed cities to show solidarity and boost morale,” in “stark contrast” with Hitler, who “refused to visit any of Germany’s devastated cities.” By September 1940, the main German aerial assault had failed, it was too late in the year to launch for the Germans to launch a land invasion, and although sporadic bombings continued until 1944 Churchill eventually assured one colleague, “We’re going to win, you know.” Sure enough, frustrated in the west, Hitler turned east, betraying his pact with Stalin’s regime and heading for defeat on a Napoleonic scale. For his part, Churchill planned on deploying the RAF to ensure the tyrant’s ruin by what he called “an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

Throughout the war, Churchill sought to bring together in a coordinated plan the various kinds of warfare he had seen in his near-half century of military study and experience. In 1942, he began to use guerrilla/commando raids in Normandy as preliminary to the major assault that would begin two years later. These forces were gradually expanded; by D-Day they consisted of four Special Service brigades manned by Army and Marine troops. On D-Day itself one of these brigades linked up with the British Airborne Division for coordinated assaults, whereby the air forces would kill enemies and stun those they didn’t kill, making them easier prey for the foot soldiers. Meanwhile, the heavy bombers continued to devastate German cities with area bombing raids, including the firebombing of Dresden, in which some 25,000 people died. Another important dimension of D-Day preparation was the Navy’s war against German submarines, which turned in Great Britain’s favor by mid-1943, ensuring a steady supply of men and material from the United States and Canada. 

Churchill had always understood that the Americans were indispensable to winning the war on the Western Front, saying that his second order of business, after surviving the Luftwaffe attacks on his island, must be to “drag the Americans in.” He went so far as to have MI6 “forge a German language map showing Hitler’s plans to attack South America; FDR took this spurious bit of intelligence seriously, describing it in an October 1941 radio broadcast. In the event, it was Japan that dragged the Americans into the war, and this led to another worry—that FDR might reduce supplies of ships to Britain in order to concentrate on rebuilding the US Pacific fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt, however, understood that the Germans posed the more immediate threat to the North American continent, preserved the supply line, and agreed with Churchill on a ‘Europe first’ strategy.

“For Churchill the Japanese threat in the Far East was always an unwanted distraction.” Except for Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, Great Britain’s major Asian holdings were well removed from Japan. He overconfidently assumed that even Singapore was too distant to be threatened. He considered the Navy adequate for its defense, although it was already heavily involved in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; moreover, British air power in the region was weak, and Churchill preferred to manufacture planes for the European campaign, including many he sent to strengthen the Soviet forces. As a result of this miscalculation, both Malaya and Singapore fell to the Japanese early in 1942. This was such a serious blow that Churchill “considered stepping down or at least relinquishing some of his responsibilities,” but he rallied, added Clement Atlee to his Cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister, but stayed on as both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. Fortunately for Churchill and for the course of the war, “the ample intelligence warnings about the Japanese threat” he had received were unknown to the British public or Parliament at the time. “It is hard to see how Churchill could have survived the political fallout” if they had been.

Adding to his Asian dilemma, Indian dissidents aimed at taking advantage of the war to fight for independence. Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps to offer India self-governing dominion status after the war, the arrangement enjoyed by Canada. Nationalists detested one stipulation: That any Indian state or province “could opt out of the proposed union”; they “wanted a united states of India,” knowing that otherwise the Muslim population in the Pakistan region would readily declare independence—as in fact they eventually did. “Cripps had no magic wand with which to heal the rifts in Indian domestic politics nor could he speed up the process of granting greater autonomy.” Nonetheless, the Indian army and police, who held the real power, “remained steadfastly loyal” to Great Britain for the duration of the war, although Churchill still needed to deploy 100,000 soldiers to put down the nationalist insurrection. “After these tense weeks in the summer of 1942, Churchill knew deep down that Indian independence could not be ignored forever.”

Scarcely one to regard British help with gratitude, Stalin “could never forget Churchill’s military intervention in Russia” after the First World War. Throughout the 1930s, Stalin “was only interested in the survival of Soviet Communism,” and his “support against Fascism” in the Spanish Civil War and elsewhere “simply fueled Soviet totalitarianism in the name of protecting the [Soviet] state.” (This came as a rude surprise to the leftist utopian novelist H.G. Wells, who interviewed the tyrant and learned that he despised Roosevelt’s New Deal as “a move to con the American working class.”) When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Churchill “was initially convinced that the Soviet Union, despite the size of the Red Army, would fall swiftly just like France,” reprising the fate of the Czarist regime in the First World War. 

But by spring of 1942, the Red Army had survived, and the Kremlin demanded not only Allied commencement of a push against Germany from the west but postwar control of eastern and central Europe. “Churchill was not prepared to abandon the Poles, as it was Poland’s dismemberment that had brought Britain and France into the war in the first place.” Moreover, Churchill pointed out that Great Britain and the United States simply would not be prepared to launch a western counteroffensive in the near future. Stalin raged, but he had no way to compel the West to act; Churchill was simply telling him the truth, something Stalin was not accustomed to being told by his underlings. Nor could he understand “Britain and America’s preoccupation with the Mediterranean,” which is where they concentrated their efforts in 1943. The was simple: they hadn’t yet mustered the military strength to fight the Germans in northern Europe and permitted themselves to hope that Italy would prove a “soft underbelly” through which northern Europe could be attacked. “Churchill and Roosevelt, thanks to their determination to defeat the Axis powers, made their decisions largely on military rather than political grounds. Stalin in contrast took a much longer-term view of the war. He was determined to safeguard Soviet soil by protecting it from any future surprise attack by Germany.” At the Tehran Conference at the end of the year, Stalin assured FDR that “all he wanted was to ensure the safety of his own country and that he would work towards democracy and peace.” He did not remark that “democracy” to him meant the dictatorship of the proletariat under the triumphant banner of the Communist Party vanguard, and that “peace” meant a world under Communist Party rule. Roosevelt, who often worried more about the British Empire than any impending Soviet one, began to distance himself from Churchill. This left Churchill to worry about Communist inroads in the Balkans, particularly Greece, where civil war between the local Communists and non-Communists had erupted and the latter, with British assistance, managed to hold the line, even though the rest of the Balkans were to be ruled by Communists in the postwar period.

The result of all this was Soviet domination of the regions Stalin most wanted to dominate, including much of Germany. As for Churchill himself, he lost the prime ministership in the elections following V-E Day. Voters, and especially British servicemen, were fed up not so much with Churchill but the Conservative Party, which they held largely responsible for the failure to deter Hitler in the first place. One suspects that, having ended the danger of the Nazis in Europe, they didn’t relish the prospect of continuing in the fight against Japan, preferring to leave that to the Americans. In the summer of 1945, they knew nothing of the development of the atomic bomb, which would make any drawn-out campaign in the Pacific unnecessary.

Tucker-Jones concurs with Churchill’s own judgment of his career, writing that “his long apprenticeship” in military affairs prepared him “for the day he became Prime Minister.” By 1940, “no one was as well qualified as he was.” In all, “he chose a role in life and played it well.”

Tucker-Jones plays his own role well, too, although not without flaw. Clear on the menace of the Nazi regime, he is oddly blind to the character of Soviet Communism. Stalin’s “attempts to shape Russia’s future,” he writes, “were founded on the fear of Bolshevism and the impact it could have on the world order. Unfortunately, by championing international intervention” in the aftermath of the First World War “he helped to ensure that the Soviet Union became an enemy of the West until 1941” and fueled “that historic mistrust” that “quickly returned, leading to the Cold War.” This, it must be said, is rubbish. The Soviets had always intended to overthrow what they regarded as ‘bourgeois democracy.’ They were Marxists.