Max Hastings: Why Churchill?

Why Churchill again? Hasn’t every detail of his career, especially in World War II, been flogged to death ? I thought not when I started on Finest Years, and now I am sure of it.

Yes, Churchill’s documents and papers have been exhaustively explored by historians- there are no great secrets to be found. But there remained a host of issues about which I believed there were new and important things to say. Here are a few of them:

• Churchill’s luckiest break of 1940 was getting away with what I call the Second Dunkirk- the June rescue of almost 200,000 men from the north-western French ports whom he rashly sent there after the BEF was evacuated from the beaches.
• The Royal Navy, not the RAF, was the decisive deterrent to Hitler’s Operation Sealion.
• Churchill’s biggest problems started once the Battle of Britain was won. Where could British forces fight the Germans ? He owed a perverse debt to Mussolini for entering the war. If Wavell’s army had not been able to engage the Italians in Africa, it is hard to see where the British could have fought the Axis until the US came into the war.
• Only Churchill, I suggest, could have conducted the wooing of America with such passion, skill and success. Most of the British, and their political leaders, were strongly anti-American. It was a source of embarrassment to wartime ministers, that the public was passionately pro-Russian, almost equally passionately anti-American, partly because the US extracted such harsh financial terms from Britain for their aid in 1940-41.
• By far the most difficult period of Churchill’s war leadership came in 1942, not 1940. Even some of his closest colleagues wanted to remove operational control of the war from his hands. Churchill, in his turn, almost despaired of the inability of the British Army to translate his great heroic vision into reality. Himself a hero, he became increasing bitter and disappointed amid the failures of the British Army. I argue that this was not a problem merely of choosing better commanders, but of institutional weakness. The Royal Navy and RAF performed far more impressively than the army to the end of the war, to Churchill’s bitter chagrin.
• One of Churchill’s gravest mistakes was to mandate Special Operations Executive, SOE, to ‘set Europe ablaze’. He committed Britain to promote mass popular revolts in occupied Europe. This was never militarily realistic. Where local peoples did attempt revolts, they paid a terrible price in massacred civilians and hostages, without advancing victory by a day.
• Another Churchillian error was the attempt to seize Rhodes in October 1943 by occupying the Dodecanese. It generated a dramatic two-month campaign almost unnoticed by many historians. It imposed painful losses on the Royal Navy and RAF, and wrote off five infantry battalions. The amazing Dodecanese adventure provided the setting for Alastair Maclean’s thriller and film The Guns Of Navarone. The campaign was Churchill’s personal inspiration. Here I have told the full tragic story.
• One of Churchill’s most bizarre acts in his last weeks in office was to commission the Chiefs of Staff in May 1945 to draft a plan to liberate Poland from Russian domination using 47 allied divisions and the remains of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Here is the story of Operation Unthinkable, recounted in all its amazing detail.

My admiration for Churchill never flags. It has been a joy to paint his portrait in all its splendour in this book. But I believe many readers will gain perspectives on his leadership, and on the Second World War, from Finest Years which will surprise them as much as they surprised me when I came upon them. I shall be bitterly disappointed if anybody puts down the book claiming that they knew it all before. I did not- which is why it has been such a fascinating experience to research and write this epic tale.