Churchill as War Leader

The political analyst and historian Richard Lamb waited 50 years after events so that the British archives could be freely searched for first drafts of letters, memos, cables, and other communiques. We learn what the principals were actually thinking and feeling before they toned down their language in later drafts. Many hints of Winston Churchill's less than perfect diplomacy and military "genius" are scattered through histories and memoirs that he could not bowdlerize. Along with a generally positive assessment of Churchill's popularity as at tough pitbull, these imperfections are highlighted in Lamb's account. Here we find Churchill to have been doggedly and impetuously fallible, terrible in confrontation, mulish in his negotiations, and very shrewd in his sub-rosa efforts to bring the United States into the war. He fired good generals and kept on mediocre ones; he blundered so badly with the French that Americans paid blood on the beaches of North Africa. He pushed for boyishly-conceived sallies against military advice and got blood on his hands for which he dodged responsibility. Without stating so explicitly, Lamb makes it clear that of the three European warlords, Churchill was the least capable; if it had not been for the codebreakers (Ultra), Hitler's strategies and tactics likely would have mangled every British, Canadian, and British-American venture. And the perfidy Churchill used to further his post-war aims for the British Empire was outclassed and outgunned by Stalin. Lamb's prose is elegant as his research is uncannily good. Every WWII amateur should read this book. Pity that it went out of print.