BOOK REVIEW: ‘Winston’s War’

WINSTON’S WAR: CHURCHILL 1940-1945
By Max Hastings
Knopf, $35.00, 552 pages, illustrated

While driving across London one day at the height of the blitz, Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw a long line of people. Motioning his driver to halt, Churchill directed his bodyguard to find out what they were queuing for. Told that they hoped to find birdseed, Churchill burst into tears. Birdseed in the midst of devastation.

It is a very human Churchill who is at the heart of the latest work by Max Hastings, one of Britain’s most distinguished historians.

By 1943, the tide had turned in favor of the Allies. The Soviet Union - nearly destroyed by Hitler’s June 1941 attack - had subsequently made good use of its geography, industrial resources and Stalin’s unchallenged ability to dictate policy to turn back the invader. After Pearl Harbor, the United States had moved to a war footing and brought to the war its seemingly unlimited industrial potential and rapidly expanding armed forces.

But the Allies never would have turned the corner against the Axis powers had a defiant Britain not stood alone for two years and refused to negotiate the peace that would have given Hitler a free hand with Russia. It was Winston Churchill who, by the force of his personality, led his nation through the first devastating years of the war. In Mr. Hastings’ words, “Churchill possessed the ability, through his oratory, to invest with majesty the deeds and even failures of mortal men.”

The Royal Air Force had won the Battle of Britain in the air. But elsewhere, Britain’s power was on the wane, and at home there were those who were prepared to negotiate with Hitler. The army posed a special problem. After its disaster in France, ending with the massive evacuation from Dunkirk, the British army had rearmed and expanded but could find little to do beyond defending the home islands. Having seen the German Wehrmacht up close in France, Churchill’s generals were reluctant to undertake any new campaign in Europe.

In Mr. Hastings’ words, “It was not that Britain’s top soldiers were unwilling to fight. It was that they deemed it prudent to fight slowly.” Even the mighty Royal Navy was proving a blunt instrument in coping with the threat of German U-boats. “One of the few useful purposes fulfilled by British battleships in the Second World War,” Mr. Hastings writes, “was to convey Churchill on his wartime journeys in a style befitting the arbiter of an embattled empire.”

When Churchill became prime minister, his immediate objective had been to bring the United States into the war. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt was in no position to oblige him until Hitler - in perhaps his greatest blunder - declared war against the United States after Pearl Harbor. The author believes that one of Churchill’s triumphs was in persuading FDR to make Germany his first priority in the face of widespread sentiment in America for retribution against Japan.

Once having led his nation through the worst of the German bombing and the immediate threat of invasion (“We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.”) Churchill had a new role - that of developing, together with his allies, a strategy for winning the war.

It was a daunting challenge. The Russians repeatedly demanded that the Americans and British open a second front that would relieve pressure on the Soviets. In the author’s words, “A fundamental doctrinal divide persisted throughout the war: the British liked minor operations, while the Americans … did not.”

U.S. strategic thinking, like that of the Germans and Russians, was dominated by a belief in concentration of force. Right up to D-Day, Churchill feared the result of any amphibious assault on France. He had great respect for the German soldier (as does Mr. Hastings) and hence he sought means of nibbling at Hitler’s periphery to avoid a direct attack on the Continent.

Churchill was also concerned about likely French casualties as a result of the Allied invasion. Whatever the outcome of the war, Britain would still have France as a neighbor. The British gained an important victory in November 1942 when they deflected an American proposal for an assault on France in 1943 in favor of landings in North Africa that would reduce the German threat against Egypt. The June 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy would prove a near thing; for D-Day to have been attempted a year earlier, when Hitler’s armies were largely unbloodied in Russia, might well have meant disaster.

For all his energy and charisma, Churchill was a difficult taskmaster. His practice of working into the small hours of the morning was trying for his staff. He arrived at the Quebec conference in 1943 without having read important position papers. An aide offered to read them to Churchill in his bath, but the arrangement proved only partially successful “because of Churchill’s tendency to submerge himself from time to time, missing key passages of the brief.”

Churchill’s strategic judgment was often flawed. He insisted on sending troops to Norway in 1940, where they were quickly ousted by the Germans. He continued to send troops to France at a time when France’s defeat was imminent. At heavy cost, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to assist Greece against the Axis powers. In addition, Mr. Hastings writes, “Churchill allowed himself to be distracted into pursuit of self-indulgent whims, such as a proposal that some aged British naval guns mounted at Dover should be shipped to the Continent to aid Eisenhower’s campaign.”

But Mr. Hastings’ judgment on his subject is overwhelmingly favorable. The prime minister’s foremost quality, according to the author, was his strength of will. “Churchill,” he writes, “empowered millions to look beyond the havoc of the battlefield, and the squalor of their domestic circumstances amid privation and bombardment, and to perceive a higher purpose in their struggles and sacrifices.”

Biographer and historian John M. Taylor lives in McLean, Va.