Winston Churchill, Leader and Historian

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S new book falls into two distinct halves — Out of Office and In Office — if not as different as chalk from cheese, at least as different as ice and water. In the last three hundred pages of The Gathering Storm: The Second World War (Houghton Mifflin in association with Cooperation Publishing, $6.00) he tells of his own deeds; in the first four hundred he gives us the history of the years between the wars, during most of which he was a spectator — a highly privileged spectator and one whose keen insight and innumerable friendships give much weight to his opinions, but a spectator all the same.

The authorities whom he quotes have nearly in every case long been published, and the history with which he deals has mostly been written before. He assails the governments whose foreign and military policies (Mr. Churchill is at his best in his insistence upon the close relationship between military power and foreign policy) during those fatal years were as inept as anything history can show. He draws an analogy between the Baldwin-MacDonald regime and the Walpole administration of two centuries earlier, but he need not have gone back quite so far. There appears to be a closer analogy between Mr. Baldwin and Lord North; in each case we have a Prime Minister carrying through a fatal policy by the aid of astute party management. Mr. Baldwin was obsessed with the notion (not uncommon among Prime Ministers) that the stability of the country depended on his continuance in power; Lord North wished to maintain the royal ascendancy; but each persisted in a course of action which, within a very few years, was proved to be utterly wrongheaded.

Perhaps Mr. Churchill does not lay quite enough stress on one factor which accounts for much of the national acquiescence in the Baldwin-MacDonald policy—namely, the almost universal belief that nobody outside an asylum (certainly no one in a responsible position) would be such a fool as to start war again. Statesmen might threaten and bluster, or even, as became apparent later on, might send inconsiderable Japanese against negligible Chinese, Italians against Abyssinians, to kill or to be killed, but no one would ever take a decision that would put the soldiers back in the trenches of Passchendaele; the voting public of the world believed that, confronted by such possibility, no one could possibly commit such an act of criminal folly. At the last moment the blusterers would draw back. Nowadays we can at least profit by the knowledge that it can happen again.

Yet allied with this feeling among the masses was another feeling among the leaders: fear. It was fear which, in the last word, held back the British government from dealing with Mussolini in the Mediterranean as he should have been dealt with and as (history now shows) he could have been dealt with. Fear influenced the foreign policy of every government, whose true interest lay in the maintenance of law and order, to such an extent that even after the die had been cast and war was an actual though still almost unbelievable fact, the French government was afraid to stir up Hitler by offensive action for fear of reprisals. They thought of death raining from the skies; no one knew howeffective air warfare might be, and no one was anxious that his people should find out first. Today statesmen face similar problems.

From the moment of the accession of Hitler to power, the need of a leader on the opposite side was of vital urgency, and yet no such leader arose, no one man who could rally not only the opinion but the military potential of civilized Europe in the cause of peace. If Mr. Baldwin had only possessed Mr. Churchill’s military insight and his fearlessness of responsibility — ! It Mr. Churchill had only possessed Mr. Baldwin’s ability to manage an electorate — !

Looking back as Mr. Churchill does we are as amazed as he is both at the number and at the magnitude of the mistakes of the British government, of the French government, and for that matter of the American government. Mr. Churchill himself was in high office during the time when the first seeds of future troubles were being sown; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer for five years while Seeckt was laying the foundations of the German army with which later Hitler nearly conquered the world, and therefore he must bear a little of the responsibility himself. But after that Mr. Churchill held no office; part of the time he was not even a member of Parliament, and part of the time he was not a member of the Conservative Party, and he could only utter warnings to which no attention was paid, while the civilized governments slid steadily down the slope towards destruction — and sometimes were pushed instead of sliding, and sometimes leapt down it voluntarily.

From mere inertia the French government permitted the reoccupation of the Rhineland; of its own free will the British government entered into the naval agreement with Hitler which made war possible for Germany by ensuring her dominance of the Baltic, and everybody kept silence — save Mr. Churchill — while Hitler pushed on that rearmament of Germany in the air and on the land which was the most dangerous violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Mr. Churchill uttered continual cries of warning, and in every case that he quotes he was proved right by subsequent events — we could wish we could be as right In any single thing as Mr. Churchill was right in everything.

THEN came war, and Mr. Churchill was instantly requested by Mr. Chamberlain to assume the responsibilities of the Admiralty; the correctness of his predictions entitled him to office, in addition to his record as a fearless and ceaselessly energetic minister in wartime, and we can guess that the brilliance of the opening volumes of The World Crisis played a large part in the decision as to which office he should actually hold. Mr. Churchill took over the direction of a navy for whose development and organization others had been responsible for more than twenty years. It was a superb fighting force, remarkably free from the purely materialistic obsessions which had characterized British naval thought (in defiance of the Nelsonian tradition) in 1914, when tonnage was weighed against tonnage, and armament against armament, and yet German gunnery control enabled German guns to commence hitting in half the time it took British guns to hit back, and German night-fighting arrangements (as Jellicoe subsequently complained) were so superior to those of the British as to make a night action undesirable on those grounds alone.

The navy in 1939 was trained and equipped for its tasks, and the action in the River Plate speedily demonstrated the fact, when the Exeter scored hits on the Graf Spee as quickly as that crack ship with her bigger guns scored hits upon her. Mr. Churchill describes the action with all the brilliance and lucidity we have come to expect of him, and the victory there was the direct result of teamwork of the highest order. Mr. Churchill himself was responsible for the deployment of the navy in the “hunting units,” each strong enough to deal with a surface raider, and in the areas where the hunting units would be most effective, and it was Commodore Harwood’s brilliant intuition which took Force G to the River Plate at the very hour when the Graf Spee appeared there, and it was the excellence of the British tactics and training that did the rest.

Meanwhile Mr. Churchill had been dealing with vigor and resolution with the multifarious problems of a First Lord of the Admiralty — problems on which the life of the nation depended: the institution of convoy, the allocation of forces to watch the Italian fleet, and the priorities regarding new construction. He saw at once the necessity for escort vessels — ships more economically and more rapidly built than destroyers, and formidable only to submarines — and was responsible for the early construct ion of those frigates and corvettes which, when the German submarine campaign was later at its height, retained the command of the sea in the hands of the cause of justice. Inevitably he explored the possibilities of wresting from Hitler the command of the Baltic — the most fatal offensive blow sea power could deal him — but he could find no solution to that problem which he and Fisher had tried to solve a generation earlier and which the Allies in all their might found insoluble three years later.

Equally inevitably, he was bound to be led from these considerations to contemplate with dismay the consequences of Norwegian neutrality. With the freezing of the Baltic the railway to Narvik and the inland passage through the Leads took on greater importance. Norwegian neutrality made it possible for Hitler to bring iron ore from Sweden, which really meant that Norwegian neutrality was maintaining Hitler in power. England — and Churchill as the wielder of English sea power — was faced with a situation of such frequent occurrence in English history as to be hackneyed. Academic or punctilious respect for neutral rights meant damage to the national cause, and it was the vital duty of a British statesman to try at least to circumvent those rights. Even direct violation of them might be justifiable, as regards both national necessity and the danger to civilization. In 1914 to 1918, Norway had acquiesced — had even cooperated — in technical violations of her neutrality, and it was to be expected that today, with the cause of right and wrong so much more evident, she would raise no greater objections.

In this connection the incident of the Altmark was of special significance. The Altmark was carrying a cargo of British prisoners down the Norwegian coast towards Germany. The Norwegian government stated that after search she had been found neither to be armed nor to contain prisoners. Mr. Churchill himself framed the orders, absolutely explicit, which sent Captain Philip Vian (as he then was) in the Cossack to board the Altmark in defiance of Norwegian protests. The Altmark was captured and the prisoners freed — a stirring tale to delight a world-wide public suspicious of the “phony war.” The world saw only the dashing exploit, and it is only now that we know that it was Mr. Churchill who bore the whole responsibility and who would have been held up to execration if (as was perfectly possible) Norwegian sailors had been killed in action with the British navy and the Norwegian government’s statements proved correct.

But the affair had gone off brilliantly. No lives had been lost, the operation had been justified in public opinion by its spectacular success, and, most important of all, Norway had been proved — or at least Norwegian officials speaking for their government had been proved — to have submitted to gross violations of Norwegian neutrality by Germany. It was fear of war with Germany — fear of the bombs and brutality — which was influencing the Norwegian government; moreover, Norway’s protests against the British action, stultified as they were by her having been proved in the wrong, were feeble in the extreme. It seemed to make it possible, both legally and practically, to insist on Norway’s agreeing to the closure of the Leads by a mine field. Yet that could not be all, for precautions must also be taken to prevent Germany from sweeping the mine field, as she undoubtedly would try to do, and to make impossible a German occupation of Norway which would guarantee Hitler against any recrudescence of the trouble. If Hitler were contemplating such a thing — and there were hints that he was — he must be forestalled; in other words there must be an Allied military occupation of Norway, and Mr. Churchill pressed for it.

Logically, and to the mind of someone knowing the secret history, such a stroke was perfectly justifiable, but many will not agree with Mr. Churchill in what he said in his memorandum to the Cabinet : that “no evil effect will be produced upon the greatest of all neutrals, the United States.” This was December, 1939; at that time the justice of the British cause would have been seriously endangered in American eyes if England had landed an army for the conquest of Norway; it was well for the happiness of the world that Hitler struck first and overran Norway with an even more cynical disregard for international rights and opinion.

More effectively, too. He struck with all his force and with unparalleled efficiency. Mr. Churchill’s story of the British countermoves makes pathetic reading. In 1807, when the British countered an almost exactly similar move by Napoleon in Denmark, they were ready (thanks to the experience of fourteen years of war) with a fleet and army that ensured success; it is almost unbelievable that in 1940 the Cabinet had to scrape up single battalions — single companies even — of infantry to throw on the Norwegian coast, months after the operation had first been suggested. There was ill fortune too — storms, snow, the deaths of important individuals — but that does not really lessen the gravity of the charge of complete ineptitude leveled against the government whose expiring act was this unavailing and feeble defense of Norway.

So the book closes with the fall of the Chamberlain government and the rise of Mr. Churchill to the Premiership on the very day when, coincidentally, the German assault opened in the West. It is a book for every historian to study. As a literary achievement it falls somewhat below Mr. Churchill’s previous lofty standard. It shows marks of haste in composition. Tanga was unsuccessfully attacked in 1914, not 1917, and in one or two cases the admirable British system of putting the month in Roman figures, when writing a date, has led in the Appendix to some self-evident errors. And Mr. Churchill is occasionally careless of his English. He speaks of a “vengeance thrust,” and he says “a lot had happened,” and he frequently lapses into colloquialisms unnatural in such a deep student of Gibbon and Macaulay. But there can be no doubting the lofty spirit of the author; and his selfdedication to the general good, will remain an example to succeeding generations forever.

Mr. Churchill occupies a special position and is under a special responsibility as a writer of English prose. In millennia to come, his work will be studied as we now study Thucydides and Tacitus, as source books of incomparable value. He is happily devoid of the almost morbid self-consciousness which restrains most of his contemporaries from employing eloquence, for fear lest they fall into rhetoric, and he will use on occasion an exalted phrasing entirely compatible with his theme and with the emotions both of himself and his reader. The sheer beauty of some of his passages is admirably set off by the directness and common sense of his parallel commentary; he will make a truth enchantingly obvious where Tacitus would have used a crabbed epigram or Thucydides a portentous profundity, all the three cases demonstrating perfect mastery of the medium employed, and giving the pleasure a display of mastery always gives. That is why we should like Mr. Churchill to do it every time.