Churchill Revisited: Greatest of Leaders

IT is generally agreed that but for Winston Churchill, Britain would have capitulated to Nazi Germany in the terrible days of May 1940. The most formidable war machine ever assembled had scattered the French army and had broken the British Expeditionary Force into a horde of refugees fleeing to Dunkirk and then (aided by a German halt) across the Channel to England. The continent was Hitler’s. He would take the British island before the month was out. What was there to stop him? The English foreign minister, Lord Halifax, judged the situation hopeless; he wished to accept Italy’s offer of mediation and sue for terms—surrender. The American ambassador reported home that Britain was finished. To President Roosevelt at a distance, it looked that way too.

What—or who—was there to stop Hitler? In 1939 the Conservative leaders turned to Churchill, who had been ten years out of office, appointing him prime minister, with little hope and no enthusiasm. They never liked him—a maverick who had jumped the party once, who stood out amid the mediocre by his energy and ability. Churchill did the impossible: he rallied the government and the people by sheer force of character, determination, and eloquence—and by his refusal to accept that the mad Hitler and nightmarish ss should ever trample England’s green turf. The spirit of battle was in his bones, in his soul. In 1940 England lay like a hulk in the water, helpless. Churchill stood off the overwhelming German power massed on the French and Belgian coast, only the English Channel (defended by the Royal Navy and the raf) barring the way. “’Twas a famous victory” in truth; his desperate defense of the British island was one of the bravest victories against the worst odds. The clear-seeing, clear-writing military historian Max Hastings says of him in Winston’s War (2011) that “he was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the 20th century”; he adds, perhaps extravagantly, “of all time.”

Britain got little help from Roosevelt in her hour of greatest need. Roosevelt was of course restrained by the overwhelming sentiment in the U.S. against getting into the war. He feared, too, that arms given to failing Britain would pass into German hands. Still he received Churchill’s desperate pleas coldly. He did not seem to appreciate that Britain’s defeat and occupation by the Nazis would be a supreme disaster, a supreme American disaster, indeed a world catastrophe. With all of western Europe in Nazi Germany’s possession, nothing would lie between the U.S. and Nazi power but the Atlantic. Russia would tremble. The Middle East and much of East Asia would come under German influence, not to speak of control. If Germany got possession of even a part of the British Navy, that part would go to swell its own navy, while at the same time Germany would be furiously building new flotillas. It would lend valuable assistance to the Japanese in their impending assault on Pearl Harbor. The Nazis would intensify their activities in Mexico and Central and South America. The United States would find herself in unprecedented mortal danger. What a prospect! After an event has taken place it acquires a powerful but false inevitability; there was nothing inevitable about the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. Its victory, rather, seemed inevitable.

Churchill, the war commander, is the figure best preserved in his nation’s memory and in her annals—and in the admiring American memory as well. The other Churchill, the one who thought and wrote, is not popularly celebrated, as is only to be expected. The well-read, poetry-quoting Churchill was equally fascinating but not separate from the fighting captain. He was born into the noblest of families, the Marlboroughs, who were descended from another great captain, the John Churchill who triumphed at Blenheim against Louis xiv in 1703. Winston Churchill was born an aristocrat when that was still possible, and he remained one all of his life. His opinion of the liberal democracy that Britain was becoming was dim. In his...