In Command Of History Churchill Fighting And Writing The Second World War Book

A magnificent and elegant work, unique in its construction and scrupulous precision. The subtitle says it all: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War.

From the outset of Winston Churchill's brief military career he offered his journalistic services to newspapers, reporting back on his experiences and earning extra money. Army pay was poor, and he was already a natural storyteller and excellent prose stylist. His aristocratic heritage gave him the prominence to attract attention and the confidence to claim it. Though his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had married a rich American girl, Jennie Jerome, her family's wealth had not survived his father's profligacy, and young Winston needed to live up to his rank and expectations.

Later, he wrote on historical subjects, including Marlborough: His Life and Times, a biography of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, who was his lineal ancestor, and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a four-volume history of Britain and its former colonies and possessions.

But most importantly, he perfected the memoir as history format, not simply to record front line experience but to assure his place in it and position him as he preferred.

In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War cuts back and forth, in almost cinematic parallelism, between the making of history, after Churchill's ascendance to the British premiership in 1940, and the writing of it, with Churchill never far from the heroic center of the action. Both processes are fascinating, though the hard work of writing the six-volume set The Second World War through the late 1950's, financing it, and publishing it in many forms and languages—with the support of a very talented group they called The Syndicate—would turn out to be a magnificent (if rather esoteric) saga in itself. Stage by stage, as the war evolves so do the books.The following fairly long but rewarding and rich excerpt gives a sense of the delicate balance required to write history when most of the protagonists are still alive, with credit and respect given and offense avoided. Waiting would destroy all interest in the subject, and with it the profits of publishing:Churchill's neglect of Alanbrooke and the Chiefs of Staff in his memoirs caused deep hurt. This was one reason why "Brookie"started writing "Notes on My Life" to complement his diaries and assist Sir Arthur Bryant, the official biographer commissioned by his old regiment. It was intended that the biography should appear after Alanbrooke's death, but in the autumn of 1954 Bryant looked through the diaries and notes and, finding them "fascinating" and of "immense importance," suggested writing a "preliminary" account before the public lost all interest in the War." Alanbrooke agreed, so Bryant set aside his popular history of England and embarked on The Turn of the Tide. This was built around Alanbrooke's material about the Allied conferences of 1941–1943, but the first third of the text covered the period before he became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in November 1941.

The reason why was made clear early on, where Bryant insisted that the "miracle" of the Dunkirk evacuation depended on a prior miracle: "the Army reaching the coast at all." This was "due mainly to one man": General Brooke, then a corps commander covering the long exposed flank opened up by the Belgian surrender. His "lightning action" averted "the greatest disaster of British military history." Yet, said Bryant, "the man who saved the Army at Dunkirk and helped to chart the road to victory is best known today as a lecturer on bird films and ex-President of the London Zoo." This was the first and most important objective of Bryant's book: to ensure that the spate of memoirs did not swamp the contribution of what he called Britain's "greatest soldier" of the war. His larger purpose was to show what the British had contributed to victory, not just by heroic survival in 1940 but by shaping the strategy that, he argued, won the war by grinding down Germany in North Africa and Italy before thrusting across the Channel. This "concentric" approach prevented Hitler from using his strategic reserve to destroy a premature cross-Channel attack of the sort advocated by Marshall and the Americans, whose "experience of modern warfare was very small." Although not "the sole originator" of this strategy, Brooke "took the lead" in pressing it on the Americans at wartime conferences. He did this, the book emphasized, at great personal cost—turning down the Middle East command in 1942 because he felt he was needed in London, only to be passed over for the Normandy invasion because Roosevelt and Churchill decided in 1943 to appoint an American.

In such a book, Bryant had to deal head-on with Churchill. He did so right at the start in a "Prelude" entitled "A Partnership in Genius," which presented Brooke as "the necessary counterpart" and "complement" to the great leader. "No statesman since Alfred has done England such service as Churchill," Bryant asserted. Among his "immense" virtues as a war leader were courage, imagination, oratory, and humor. He always looked to attack; he "would never take No for an answer." But those virtues, pushed too far, became failings. The "tireless energy" bred "impatience," the "soaring imagination" led to "impetuosity," prompting Churchill "to essay enterprises which, had he not been dissuaded, would have ended in disaster." It was Brooke's role to say no, or at least "not yet"—to see the war as a whole and in sequence, persuading Churchill not to dissipate Britain's forces in premature or peripheral operations.

Having sketched this portrait in the prelude, Bryant then develops it with color and detail from Alanbrooke's diaries and notes. There are references to Churchill's propensity to make decisions by "intuition" not logic, his tendency "to stick his fingers into every pie before it was cooked", and his "eagerness to do everything simultaneously instead of concentrating on one thing at a time." We read of Brooke's frustration as he tries to wean Churchill away from pet projects such as attacking Norway and learn that it is he, not the Prime Minister, who is the truly consistent advocate of a Mediterranean strategy. All this, however, is balanced by frequent tributes from Bryant or Brooke's diary to Churchill's supreme achievements—his courage and decisiveness after the fall of France, his wooing of Roosevelt and the Americans in 1940–1941, his fortitude in the desperate weeks after Pearl Harbor—"The Prime Minister never flinched. Disaster brought out all that was greatest in him." At the end of the book, after chronicling the Brooke's anguish at losing the D-Day command, Bryant quotes the diary entry on Churchill for 30 August 1943: "He is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck, but I would not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth."

Bryant submitted his manuscript to Norman Brook, who read it in September 1956 (as the Suez crisis neared its climax). The Cabinet Secretary made no objection on official grounds; in fact, he said he had "enjoyed the book very much," particularly Bryant's own part, which had "a splendid sweep." But in what he called "an informal expression of my personal views," Brook registered real concern about the effect of the book on Churchill's public image. Although he felt that Bryant's prelude offered "a very fair and balanced judgment of the complementary roles" of Churchill and Alanbrooke, the same could be said of the isolated diary entries, written, as Bryant himself noted, as "a safety valve for repressed irritation." Yet it was these momentary explosions that would be picked up by the press. "Praise of Winston Churchill is not 'news'; any criticism of his conduct of the war, however slight, is material for headlines." For this reason, Brook concluded, "I could have wished that the book was not to be published in Sir Winston Churchill's lifetime. And I cannot refrain from asking what steps are being taken to prepare him for the kind of publicity which (if I am not mistaken) it will receive.

Brook admitted that he was "looking at it purely from Winston's point of view," but his sage advice spurred a belated response. In December 1956, Alanbrooke added a foreword about his relations with Churchill, noting that a diary was "necessarily an impulsive and therefore unbalanced record of events" and insisting that "scattered expressions of irritation and impatience at the defects that arose out of his very greatness are insignificant when set against the magnitude of his achievement." In February 1957, the month of publication, Alanbrooke sent Churchill an advanced copy with an inscription proclaiming "unbounded admiration, profound respect, and deep affection" and asking him to discount a few "momentary" criticisms, "written at the end of long and exhausting days." This embarrassed note was too little, too late. "Brookie trying to have it both ways," observed Clementine Churchill tartly. Ismay felt that Bryant had done Alanbrooke "grievous injustice" by presenting him as a combination of "Marlborough and Napoleon" who felt that he alone was winning the war, "with occasional assistance from the Almighty." Churchill sent Alanbrooke a brief note on 12 March: "On the whole, I think I am against publishing day to day diaries written under the stress of events so soon afterwards. However, I read it with great interest, and I am very obliged to you for what you say in your inscription."

Privately, several of Churchill's wartime contemporaries believed that the portrait in Turn of the Tide was apt and essentially fair. Clement Attlee told Bryant, "We who worked with him knew how quickly he could change from the great man to the naughty child." Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War in 1942–1945, felt "it was necessary to reduce him from a god before he could be appreciated as a great man." The historian, G. M. Trevelyan found that the book had raised rather than lowered his estimation of Churchill. Although "not very considerate of his advisers," he asked for advice and sometimes took it, sometimes contrary to what he had first thought himself," whereas Napoleon and Hitler treated their generals as "servants" and eventually paid the price. Churchill's "habit of taking counsel," said Trevelyan, "combined with his own personal qualities, is what won the war."

These were private comments, however, and few would say as much in print. A rare exception was Raymond Mortimer, who felt the book showed Churchill as "nothing if not human—a self-centered genius with faults that he seeks neither to curb or to conceal." But this was in the the Sunday Times which was serializing Bryant's work. Some reviewers took up the theme of the "partnership in genius," but others dwelled, as Norman Brook feared, on irreverent trivia, such as the image of Churchill upturned, like Humpty Dumpty, by the Mediterranean surf. The impression conveyed, said Robert Pitman in the Sunday Express, was of "a lovable, rumbustious but rather naughty child when it comes to the art of war . . . just the front man behind whom a greater strategist performed his quiet work." In a caustic piece, "Meet General Superman," "Cassandra" in the Daily Mirror claimed that Alanbrooke had jumped from total obscurity to occupy "the highest literary military pedestal built within living memory." Bryant had heaped on him "a sickening, sweetened slime of unending praise" while presenting Churchill as "muddle-headed, impetuous, and positively dangerous when it came to the major decisions of war." Considering this chronicle of "violent and continuous disagreement" between Churchill and his generals, Alan Tompkins in the Sunday Dispatch felt it "a wonder that Britain won the war."

[This excerpt from Chapter 32, Leaving It To History 1955–1965 p518]