Winston Churchill: The Flawed Genius of WWII - Hardcover

Catherwood, Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0425225720 ISBN 13: 9780425225721

Publisher: Berkley, 2009

Synopsis

He was a legendary man of strength-but no man is without his weaknesses.

Revered for his strength of character when Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, Winston Churchill is painted as one of World War II's most heroic figures-a characterization that overshadows his faults, which have had their own devastating legacy.

This book examines the decisions and policies of Churchill between June 1940 and December 1941 that actually hindered the Allied cause, extended the conflict, and even destabilized several regions that remain in chaos to this day.

With profound insight into Churchill's early colonial experiences as well as his first tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty, Christopher Catherwood offers an honest appraisal of Churchill's strategies in a unique and fascinating perspective that separates the myth from the man.

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher Catherwood teaches history at Cambridge University and the University of Richmond (Virginia). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he served as a consultant to the Strategy Unit of Tony BlairĀ's cabinet, working in the Admiralty Building where Winston Churchill was based as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

PREFACE

Introduction

 

CHAPTER ONE - Stopping Hitler in 1938: When Churchill Got It Right

CHAPTER TWO - Britain Alone and Churchill’s Fatal Error

CHAPTER THREE - Getting to Know One Another

CHAPTER FOUR - Churchill and the War’s Wrong Turn

CHAPTER FIVE - Waiting for Winston

CHAPTER SIX - Churchill Finally Has to Give In

CHAPTER SEVEN - Churchill and America at War

 

Acknowledgements

NOTES

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eISBN : 978-1-101-01474-5

1. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874-1965—Military leadership. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Great
Britain. 3. Great Britain—Politics and government—1936-1945. 4. Great Britain—Foreign
relations—1936-1945. I. Title.

 

DA566.9.C5C33 2009
940.53’41092—dc22
[B]
2008047654

 

PREFACE

OF THE MAKING of many books there is no end, and the sheer volume of books on a struggle as titanic and world-changing as the Second World War is on a scale epic enough in size to match the importance of the years that they describe.

Consequently in writing on Winston Churchill—about whom whole libraries full of books have been composed—I have had to be more than selective, otherwise this work too would have run into many volumes. Frequently, therefore, I have taken just a paragraph, or sometimes a few pages, or even a whole chapter, to narrate what other authors have written whole volumes on, often in minute detail.

As a result, this book has left out more than it has left in, and so what you have is not a simple chronological account but a story with a purpose, an argument, a tale that has a moral to it.

I would have loved to include far more about the war in the Pacific, as that is a topic naturally of huge interest to Americans, and was, for the United States, a very considerable part of the war indeed. In many of the wartime discussions, the issues of Europe and the Pacific were closely interwoven, including in terms of supplies and logistics. Not only that but, for example, Roosevelt disagreed strongly with Churchill over the prime minister’s quixotic defense of the Indian Empire, the Raj, which Roosevelt rightly saw as an institution whose time should long since have gone—and, indeed, it did go in 1947, since the postwar Labour government fully agreed with the president on such issues.

I should also add that southern and eastern Asia, major additions to the narrative of this book, are beyond your author’s sphere of knowledge, which is not the case with either Europe or the Middle East. I can write with understanding about, for instance, the Ljubljana Gap in the Adriatic, an area of much strategic dispute between Churchill and the Americans, not only because I have studied the region academically but because I have also been there personally, not to mention to the beaches of Normandy where D-day was fought, or to various Middle Eastern deserts where battles have been fought not just in the 1940s but for millennia. Of the Burma Road or the Andaman Islands, or of such places famous in US history as Corregidor or the Coral Sea, I am sadly unfamiliar.

So this book, while not short, is by nature selective. But I think it tells a fascinating tale, one that shaped the world we live in today; even well into the twenty-first century we remain as much as ever in the world created by the way in which the Second World War was fought and won, and by the decisions that giants such as Winston Churchill in particular made.

Churchill would himself start each of his wartime volumes with a theme of the work. Perhaps we can do the same here, and in the same style:

 

HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS RIGHT OVER MUNICH
UNDERSTOOD THE REAL ISSUES ABOUT HITLER
REALIZED WAR WAS ABOUT ACTUALLY FIGHTING YOUR ENEMY
SAVED BRITAIN FROM DEFEAT FROM THE NAZIS IN 1940
KNEW THAT VICTORY WOULD ONLY COME WITH AMERICAN HELP
GAVE THE BRITISH THE MORALE TO HANG ON UNTIL THEN
AND PROVED FOREVER HIS SHEER GENIUS
NEVERTHELESS MADE SOME BIG STRATEGIC BLUNDERS IN 1941
REJOICED WHEN AMERICA FINALLY ENTERED THE WAR
YET TRAGICALLY FAILED TO UNDERSTAND
HOW TRULY POWERFUL ON AN UNPRECEDENTED SCALE
AND HOW TRANSFORMATIVE AMERICA WOULD BE
SO KEPT TO THE OLD WAR-WINNING WAYS OF
HIS GREAT ANCESTORS AND BRITONS BEFORE HIM
AND IN SO DOING
DELAYED THE US MILITARY PLANS THAT WOULD
IN ALL LIKELIHOOD HAVE WON THE WAR YEARS EARLIER
AND SAVED MILLIONS OF LIVES IN THE PROCESS
INCLUDING THOSE OF COUNTLESS JEWS
AND ALSO
AS CHURCHILL FINALLY SAW
WOULD HAVE PREVENTED STALIN FROM BEING
THE REAL WINNER OF THE WAR IN EUROPE
BECAUSE VICTORY THERE HAD BEEN DELAYED
AND BY SO DOING
SHOWED HIS TRAGIC FLAWS

 

That, to use the Churchillian way of stating it, is the moral of this book!

INTRODUCTION

Setting the Scene

IT WAS DECEMBER 1941. News from North Africa was bad. “Strategic withdrawals,” otherwise known as military defeats, were the order of the day. It was more than likely that Moscow would also fall, and the USSR, Britain’s only ally of any significance, would disintegrate, leaving Hitler an empire stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Ocean. The British were hanging on, but by a thread.

So when a Welsh physician turned in excitement to his teenage daughter and said, “Now we will win the war!” people would have had good cause to believe him sadly deluded.

But the Welshman, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who had written a book during the London Blitz, Why Does God Allow War?, was right when he told his daughter, my mother, the good news. For the war was now won—the United States had finally decided to enter in on Britain’s side, and the United Kingdom was no longer in danger of defeat. Hitler’s decision to declare war on the United States was an answer to all Britain’s hopes and dreams since Churchill had become prime minister in May 1940, and a vindication for those who saw the war as a struggle between freedom and tyranny. The most powerful democracy in the world was engaged at last. Victory was still a long way off—not until May 1945 in Europe and later still in the Pacific—but eventual victory was now certain.

There are many myths about the Second World War. One of these is that Churchill was the victor, the man who won it for freedom, democracy, and liberty from tyranny. But as we shall see, this is nowhere near the case, courageous and daring as Churchill most certainly was.

For the truth is otherwise—the real winners of World War II were the United States and the Soviet Union, the two postwar superpowers, and, as is obvious, only the first of these two nations was a democracy. The two major fronts of the war were the Americans against the Japanese in the Pacific, and the Russians against the Germans in Europe, on the Eastern Front. While Ike, Montgomery, and the sixty or so divisions under their command in Western Europe were fighting the Germans, four hundred divisions were engaged in a vicious, Darwinian struggle between Hitler’s Reich on the one hand and Stalin’s Soviet Union on the other. Compared to that struggle, and the large-scale barbarity and carelessness for human life with which it was fought, even D-day and the Battle of the Bulge were, in comparison, small potatoes.

So while this book is going to concentrate on Churchill heavily, and the decisions that he made, we do need first to set Churchill in the wider context of the Second World War itself, since we in the West are still, decades later, prone to believe convenient myths, as opposed to what really happened during the war; fans of Churchill, like myself, sadly being among the worst offenders.

A few statistics (courtesy of Norman Davies’s definitive book Europe at War) show this beyond question.

Between 1939 and 1945 around 144,000 British servicemen lost their lives in the European part of the conflict. Between 1941 and 1945, a shorter period, 143,000 Americans similarly died. However, Soviet deaths numbered eleven million, which is just under forty times as many fatalities as the British and American losses combined.

Churchill was rightly proud of the wonderful British victory at El Alamein in 1942, the final turning of the tide against Rommel’s Afrika Korps, and a victory that caused Churchill to order the ringing of bells across Britain. It was a much-needed boost to sagging British morale, and has been rightly remembered by people in the United Kingdom ever since, especially as it was probably the last major battle won by Britain without US aid during the rest of the war.

But the total death toll for El Alamein was 4,650. Take another Allied campaign we all know in the West: Market Garden, the failure to capture Arnhem, the famous “Bridge Too Far” in the book and film of the same name. There total deaths were 16,000, a toll almost four times as high.

Take by contrast some of the battles between Germany and Russia on the Eastern Front.

The battle of Kursk, in 1943—which we will see later on as possibly the most important in the whole war in Europe—saw 325,000 deaths, or, to put it another way, just over twenty times as many fatalities as Market Garden, and seventy times as many as the battle of El Alamein, an encounter far more famous in the West than the infinitely more important and considerably more bloodthirsty battle of Kursk, just a few months later.

We have now heard of the siege of Stalingrad, perhaps because of the recent well-received movie Enemy at the Gates, which does actually manage to give a good account, for a Hollywood production, of the chaos and terror that the siege of Stalingrad must have engendered among its participants. It is reckoned that in the siege alone some 973,000 people died (and possibly more than that).

Contrast that to the 132,000 deaths in Operation Overlord in 1944, or the 38,000 deaths during the Battle of the Bulge. Now, 132,000 Allied losses on the beaches of Normandy is a lot of people, and we do not need to have watched Saving Private Ryan to know the bravery and heroism of those who stormed the beaches and who gave their lives to create a bridgehead in France that would take the liberation of Western Europe one stage further. But the total mortalities come to just under an eighth of the figure at Stalingrad. This gives us a very different perspective altogether. To put it another way, of the 3,500,000 German soldiers who were killed in battle, only 15 percent were killed at the hands of American troops. I was engrossed by the superb TV series Band of Brothers, but Soviet troops killed well over five times as many Germans as their brave American equivalents did (taking into account those Germans killed by British and other Allied forces).

At their peak, the Americans were producing a new tank every five minutes. Only one other country came anything close to this staggering level of logistical production, and that was the Soviet Union, mobilized to the very fullest possible capacity because of the totalitarian nature of the regime. Norman Davies’s Europe at War, Richard Overy’s exhaustive Why the Allies Won, and more detailed studies, such as Rodric Braithwaite’s exciting Moscow 1941, show this very clearly. We tend to think of wars being won on the field of battle, and it is certainly true that logistical history, describing tank production, aircraft statistics, and the like, is nowhere near as good a read as tales of bravery on the battlefield.

But without the equipment, no soldier, sailor, or pilot can ever win anything. As Richard Overy demonstrates, the fact that by the end of the war, the Allies could replicate all their tank losses, whereas the Germans were not merely unable to do the same but were also running out of fuel and still having to use horses (which needed increasingly nonexistent fodder to stay alive), shows that however boring statistical history might be in comparison, factories are every bit as vital for winning modern technological warfare as generals and soldiers on the ground.

(Much of this also applies to the war in the Pacific, with which most American readers of this book are doubtless very familiar. I will deal with the conflict against Japan in parts of this book, as it is vital to gaining a proper perspective of the whole struggle. I do have to admit, however, that my knowledge of Europe is far greater than that of Asia, and correspondingly of the war in those places as well. My coverage will therefore be more political than technical/strategic, which I hope that Asia specialists among my readers will forgive.)

We are all rightly and regularly reminded of the six million entirely innocent Jews butchered in the Shoah, or Holocaust. We should certainly never forget them, and twenty-first-century Europe is massively the poorer culturally, artistically, and in countless other ways for its drastically reduced Jewish population, the fundamental immorality of the killin...

About this edition

• Publisher: Berkley
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0425225720
• ISBN 13: 9780425225721
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336