Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945 (review)

When an author tackles the subject of Winston Churchill, one of the twentieth century's most closely examined figures, it becomes important to establish at the outset (at least for the serious historians among its readers) in what way the work differentiates itself from the ever-swelling number of books on the subject already crowding library shelves. Carlo D'Este, the talented author of several highly regarded studies of World War II campaigns as well as of biographies of Eisenhower and Patton, clearly understands this and, in an introductory "Note to Readers," tells them that he will focus on "Winston Churchill's military life."

But Churchill's military career was quite brief – four years as a regular army cavalry subaltern (who spent as little time on regimental duties as he could) and, sixteen years later, five months in the trenches as a reserve lieutenant colonel commanding an infantry battalion. This might be material for an article but will not support a seven-hundred-page book. What D'Este in fact describes is Churchill's career during two world wars. But in those wars, Churchill's role was not "military." In 1914-15 he was a minister responsible for the Royal Navy and, as a member of what passed for a war cabinet under Asquith, for the formulation of Britain's war policy. In 1940-45, of course, he played a central role in the shaping of Britain's war policy as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. In both wars he was a civilian political leader responsible to Parliament, not a military leader, however often he appeared in uniform and however much he probed into tactical and logistical detail. (The tired trope "warlord," first used about Churchill three decades ago by Ronald Lewin, really needs to be retired.) To understand Churchill's career, it is necessary to grasp both the political world in which it was embedded and the social structure from which those politics sprung – to grasp, in fact, the sweep of British history in Churchill's time.

The politics of war in 1914-15, for instance, was strongly influenced by the atmosphere of the three crisis years in British political life preceding August 1914, something D'Este misses. It is clear that his research has led him deep into archives, but as his bibliography attests, not into the broader context of the war. A.J.P. Taylor's classic English History 1914-1945, to give but one striking example, is missing (as are many other significant titles). D'Este seems to have realized that the "military Churchill" was not a sturdy enough peg on which to hang his book and at times appears to be writing a full-scale biography, while at others he seems embarked on a history of the Anglo-American dimension of Churchill's Grand Alliance. But the original conceptual flaw continues to bedevil his efforts. He gets from 1922 to 1939 in one swift bound – omitting the politics of the Twenties and Thirties, which were the reason Churchill languished in the Wilderness in the 1930s. More importantly this treatment ignores as well the strategic legacy bequeathed to Churchill in May 1940 by the interwar years – the chain of dubious assumptions and bad decisions that were the precursor to military disaster in the Far East as well as the arguments and decisions (some of the early ones his own) that shaped the armed forces with which Churchill had to work in 1940-45. And when he does tackle Churchill as national war leader, he stays within the parameters established by Churchill's own very artful memoirs – which means that Britain's war in Asia, the war that mortally wounded the British Empire east of Suez, is almost completely neglected. Yet surely Churchill's role in a crucial episode in Britain's war-induced imperial decline deserves thorough...