BOOK REVIEW: Celebrating Winston Churchill

OPINION:

CHURCHILL

By Paul Johnson

Viking, $24.95, 192 pages

Reviewed by Martin Sieff

Any new book by Paul Johnson is a matter of notice and celebration. Mr. Johnson, an amateur historian in the very best sense of the word, has an excellent claim to being the most widely read and intellectually influential historian in the world over the past half century. His histories of the English, American and Jewish peoples are superb, and his masterpiece “Modern Times” played a central role in shaping the post-Reagan conservative intellectual interpretation of the 20th century.

As he showed in his iconoclastic, blistering set of profiles in “Intellectuals” and in subjects as unlikely as his histories of the Holy Land and of ancient Egypt, Mr. Johnson is incapable of writing a sentence that does not delight, infuriate but, most of all, surprise, challenge and inform his readers. One can cavil with some of his sweeping judgments, most of them joyously tilting against received conventional wisdoms. But they are always enlightening and usually correct.

Mr. Johnson is right to point out, for example, that Winston Churchill’s insistence on launching and maintaining the strategic bombing campaign against Germany was of far greater importance than British and Russian historians have acknowledged in contributing to victory on the Eastern front. By mid-1943, as he points out, the Luftwaffe had had to denude the Eastern front of fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns (and the superb German 88mm was also the Wehrmacht’s most lethal tank-destroyer) to defend the German homeland against Allied bombing attacks.

Mr. Johnson also rightly upholds Churchill’s insistence on delaying the launching of the liberation of Europe from the West as vital to prevent the massacre of hundreds of thousands of British and American soldiers if it had been attempted in 1943, let alone 1942.

He also is absolutely right in pointing out that from the perspective of preserving British global investments and interests as long as possible through the difficult postwar decades, Churchill’s supposedly anachronistic insistence on retaining control of oil, mineral and other natural resources in the Middle East and Southeast Asia was correct.

Mr. Johnson acknowledges the list of bungled and tactically disastrous, half-baked amphibious operations Churchill rashly launched in both World War I and World War II. He might indeed have added the bizarre second British Expeditionary Force to an already collapsing France in 1940, the capture and loss of Rhodes in 1943 and the bloody near-disaster at Anzio that same year to the already long list of Antwerp, the Dardanelles, Norway, Dakar, Greece and Crete.

Nor does Mr. Johnson note the important fact that Churchill never made the crucial decision to withhold British fighter squadrons from being squandered in France in 1940. That decision was taken by the British Air Staff and Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding in clear defiance of Churchill’s orders to the contrary, which they simply ignored.

But Mr. Johnson’s book is rich in telling and delightful human detail and sometimes startling statistics. Churchill, we learn, drank his endless, famous whiskies extremely diluted with soda water, and when his liver was examined after his death in his 91st year, it was found still to be in almost pristine condition.

Churchill was even more prolific in his writing than is generally realized. Mr. Johnson points out that his famous six-volume “History of the Second World War,” at more than 2 million words, is almost twice the length of Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Churchill’s landscapes in oils were also superb and received enthusiastic and deeply felt praise from the head of the Royal Academy.

Mr. Johnson, a conservative icon himself who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2006, mischievously points out that Churchill’s lifelong political principles, which never wavered (even though he changed parties twice), are best described as liberal, rather than conservative. He was the architect of old-age pensions in Britain and of sweeping prison reform before World War I, and he also created labor exchanges where the jobless could effectively look for new work.

Mr. Johnson clearly shares and revels in Churchill’s generosity of spirit and limitless intellectual energy. He has produced a book that is a joy - and a worthy tribute to both of them.

Martin Sieff is chief global analyst at the Globalist and has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. He is the author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East” (Regnery, 2008).