Customer Reviews

Churchill: the Greatest Briton Unmasked

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A Chinese proverb states: "The great man is a misfortune for the people". Once you have finished Nigel Knight's book on the Greatest Briton, you understand why this also applies in Europe.

Winston Churchill was active in British politics for half a century, his heyday was the Second World War he helped to bring about. A few months after its outbreak, Churchill became Prime Minister. Over the years to come, he would lead his country into a total war, directed, as British policy had always prescribed, against the strongest power on the continent of Europe. Before the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71, it was initially Spain and later France that had been the target, now the newly founded second German Reich found itself in the gunsights of the British Empire.

Churchill's birth practically coincided with the publication of a book, "The Battle of Dorking", which would give rise to a flood of similar stories, all aimed at making the British public sensitive to an invasion of their island. Until that time, British wars had always been fought away from home or somewhere on the high seas, but now the situation seemed to change. In many of these books, the attackers speak German. In this way, an atmosphere of anxiety took hold in the British population, and British policy, willy-nilly, had to take this state of mind into account.

Churchill grew up in this atmosphere and absorbed, no doubt, many of these ideas. They meshed well with the historical world-view underlying the curriculum of the great British schools that orientated itself on Roman history; such a view did not deal much with questions of a social or an economical nature. Quite naturally, this attitude assumed that other countries also considered history as nothing but a succession of collisions between national powers aiming to expand their possessions at the expense of other such forces - or at least preserve what they had conquered. Such a perspective would, in the 1920s and 30s, lead many English politicians and other public figures to the assumption that Hitler would attack Britain once he had the means to do so.

Such an attitude is borne out by the utterances of members of the British establishment who had undergone a similar education; in the years immediately preceding WW2, Robert Vansittart and Lord Beaverbrook - and certainly not only they - stated that either Germany or Britain had to be destroyed: they could simply not imagine anything else.

This, then, was the atmosphere obtaining in Britain when Winston Churchill came to power. Nigel Knight's book examines in detail the consequences of the decisions he took at various stages of his career: the Gallipoli adventure he had brought about, the restrictions he imposed on British armament in the 1920s (quite in keeping, by the way, with the Versailles paper which also imposed conditions on the victorious allies), his love for second, i.e. secondary, fronts which led him into Norway in 1940 or into the Balkans and Italy later on, his endearment with large battleships which were no longer decisive in naval warfare and the persistent postponement of a real second front in France, all of which had significant negative sonsequences for the Allies and prolonged the war by months if not years.

What is not dealt with much in this book are the events during Churchill's decade of internal exile in the 1930s, events which eventually resulted in his return to Whitehall. The author mentions briefly the machinations of the Focus network and Churchill's financial rescue by some generous members of this group, but does not shed much light on the forces involved. An interested reader will find a wealth of information on this critical aspect of Winston's life in Stefan Scheil's most recent book "Churchill, Hitler und der Antisemitismus".

The author takes pains to dismantle the traditional view that Chamberlain's policy of appeasement towards Hitler had been a mistake and makes it clear that a more aggressive policy would, at that point in time, not have been possible at all. It was the time gained by Chamberlain's tactics which allowed Britian to beef up its defensive airforce, thus winning the Battle of Britain and holding out until Roosevelt had obtained another mandate in late 1940. In this way, London was able to steer the newly reconfirmed president away from the isolationist position he had held during the election campaign and to obtain both his active material support and his political backing.

The reader is also informed in great detail how Churchill and Britain, through the war years, became weaker and weaker to an extent where they were barely able to feast with the victors but no longer had any real influence in the post-war world. The exclamation point behind this state of affairs is Churchill's loss of the elections in July of 1945 at the very moment of his participation in the Potsdam conference which defined the world for the next half century.

While he is allowed back into power in the 1950s, all he can now do is preside over the final dissolution of the Empire and have the end of the British role as a world power officially certified by the outcome of the Suez adventure. For Britain, the 19th century finally ended in 1956.

Like a tragic hero in a Shakespearean drama, Churchill, at the end of WW2, acknowledges that his personal policy as well as Britain's in general, had failed to recognize the true adversary, the Soviet Union. The bolshevik empire and its philosophy had constituted a power that did not have a place in the curricula of Britain's schools. Instead, one had concentrated on an enemy who corresponded to the textbook examples and, in doing so, taken the Western world to the edge of a dark valley into which, but for the grace of God, it almost disappeared.

The books ends with the cryptic statement that Churchill is remembered, above all else, for Hitler's defeat having written his own history of the events, whereas Hitler is remembered for himself.

Nigel Knight makes a convincing case that, contrary to the widely-held conventional view of Churchill as a heroic WWII leader, he was in fact a seriously-flawed leader whose misguided machinations resulted in disastrous consequences. Knight's biographical sketch focuses on Churchill's political career and his leadership during and after WWII. From beginning to end, Knight shows how nearly every strategic and tactical decision taken by Churchill was wrong and worsened the war effort. For example, Knight argues convincingly that Churchill's obsession with peripherally attacking Germany via the Mediterranean front, Germany's so-called "soft underbelly", squandered western military resources and delayed the successful cross-channel invasion by at least a year. I have read other revisionist histories that also have made the case that Churchill and FDR made major blunders that contributed to fomenting the war and aggravating its results: "Roosevelt's Road to Russia" by George N. Crocker and "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" by Patrick J.Buchanan. Knight's book differs from the others because his focus is on Churchill's personality flaws and how they caused him to advocate wrong-headed decisions:"He was not mad or simple; his misguided decisions were the product of his personality - a mixture of arrogance, emotion, self-indulgence, stubbornness." I recommend reading all three of the above revisionist histories to get a more complete, though disturbing, picture of how WWII was fomented and its results aggravated by misguided leadership. I give Knight's work 4 stars because it does not address how Churchill also erred in initially advocating war with Germany and prompting US involvement (as is pointed out by the other authors).

In an earlier life (about 50 years ago) when I was sharing WWII war stories with five uncles, all veterans of that great war, I became enamored of Winston Churchill. My enthusiasm was faned by a couple of books I bought...Volumes I and II of The Second World War by Winston Churchill and the editors of Life. But now, with the passage of time and Nigel's incredible research and insights a new, somewhat tarnished Winston Churchill emerges. And I'm having serious second thoughts about the famous (now infamous)Winston Churchill. A fascinating book, I thouroughly endorse it not only for its revelations of Churchill but for the many fascinating details of WWII of which I was totally unaware.