Churchill Goes to War: Winston’s Wartime Journeys (review)

Douglas MacArthur remarked in 1942 about Winston Churchill’s intercontinental travels that “a flight of 10,000 miles through hostile and foreign skies may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened with the world’s cares it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valour.” For Churchill’s staff, aware of his declining physical powers, such restless travels verged on the irresponsible, for they understood well how the loss of Churchill would have damaged the British war effort: General Henry Maitland (“Jumbo”) Wilson thought that flying Churchill to Gibraltar in a primitive flying boat in 1942—so primitive that engine noise prevented any conversation between the passengers—was “a feckless way of sending him over the world when he is approaching his seventieth birthday.” It was a great relief when the liberation of France in 1944 meant that British officials now had to fly only 11,000 miles to reach the Soviet Union, rather than the 17,000 miles of 1942.

Among Churchill’s neologisms was the word “summit,” as applied to diplomacy. Although he did not use the phrase “a parley at the summit” until 1950, he had practiced the idea incessantly during the Second World War—in Newfoundland, Casablanca, Quebec, Washington, Cairo, Tehran, Moscow, Yalta, and Potsdam, with lesser meetings in Bermuda, Paris, Athens (amid a civil war at Christmastime 1944), and other European cities. Franklin Roosevelt attended most of these meetings but used the terms of the U.S. Constitution as a defense against having to travel more often. The paranoid Iosif Stalin made it only to meetings held in the USSR and at nearby Tehran. But Churchill took part in every one. He traveled by far the furthest of the three in 1941–1945 and was often the first to suggest the necessity of another meeting of the “Big Three.” When the experiment of involving Charles de Gaulle at Casablanca proved counterproductive, important meetings were thereafter kept ruthlessly to the British, U.S., and Soviet leaders. They even held two meetings in Canada from which the Canadian prime minister was excluded, lest Canada’s inclusion encourage more peripheral allies such as China and Brazil to claim a seat at the top table and hence dilute a hard-bargaining forum into a mere talking shop.

Wartime summits are hardly a new subject in historical writing, and the naval historian Brian Lavery, author of the invaluable Churchill’s Navy (London: Conway, 2006), eschews serious analysis of what took place in the actual meetings. Some of his accounts have, therefore, a “mint-with-a-hole” feel to them because his extended accounts of the great man’s travels there and back are interrupted by only a few paragraphs describing what happened when he got there. The advantage is that Lavery is able to concentrate more than any previous writer on the logistics, staff preparations, and actual travel conditions than any previous writer has attempted, a process that sheds a fascinating light both on the conferences and on Churchill’s approach to them. Combining well-known published accounts by the Churchill entourage (diary-based accounts of Viscount Alanbrooke, Alexander Cadogan, Lord Moran, and Sir John Colville, as well as the memoirs of Hastings “Pug” Ismay) with unpublished private sources such as the Ian Jacob papers and official British archival records, Lavery offers a persuasive narrative from which significant truths emerge.

Lavery notices how Churchill’s invariable habit of surrounding himself when abroad with senior service officers and patrician diplomats gave U.S. and Soviet officials a skewed idea of Britain as it fought the “People’s War.” Churchill was not reluctant to take armies of workers—typists, valets, cooks, signalers, marines for personal protection, and air force ground staff to facilitate his travel. But although Labour contributed a large part of his government, no Labour minister came on these jaunts until Clement Attlee went to Potsdam, and by then the European war was over, Labour had left the Churchill government, and...