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Raymond Callahan

Churchill and His Generals (Modern War Studies) Hardcover – Illustrated, May 1, 2007

by Raymond Callahan (Author)

8 ratings

Part of: Modern War Studies (121 books)

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On the eve of World War II, the British army was more an international police force than a true combat-ready fighting machine. Raymond Callahan chronicles its trial-by-fire transformation in a new and unflinching look at Great Britain's top commanders in the field.

Callahan reexamines the much-maligned performance of the British army in that war by reevaluating its commanders' victories and defeats, their leadership abilities and flaws, and their often rocky relationships with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose powerful presence looms over every page. Revisiting wartime theaters stretching from Southeast Asia across India through the Middle East, into North Africa, and across Europe, Callahan revises and expands our understanding of how British commanders-both the best and worst-led their troops and executed their strategies.

Callahan explores the way Churchill, with his own ideas about the army's goals and concerned about the precariousness of his political fortunes, dealt with his generals, who often held views different from his own. He probes the relationship between Churchill's political goals and war aims, the army's capabilities, and its generals' battlefield performance, while assessing the roles of such leaders as Alan Brooke, Bernard Montgomery, Archibald Wavell, Claude Auchinleck, and Harold Alexander. He also reveals why William Slim should be regarded as the outstanding British commander of the war and Britain's best field commander since Wellington-and how other generals such as Neil Richie, Henry Wilson, and Oliver Leese exemplify the role of chance in history.

Past criticism has tended to ignore both the obstacles confronting the army and its dramatic improvement by war's end. Callahan sets that record straight while offering insight into the evolution of the British wartime army within the contexts of coalition warfare, the constraints of a far-flung Empire, and Churchill's political concerns and desire to retain a British presence on the world stage. He considers problems posed by manpower, training, doctrine, equipment, and new military technologies and strategies as the army faced a multifront global war that pushed an already overextended fighting force nearly to the breaking point.

Churchill and His Generals is the most comprehensive analysis of this wartime relationship, an account of institutional transformation under extreme stress that balances Churchill's own self-serving memoirs. It clearly demonstrates that what political leaders demand from their armies is less important than what those armies are designed to do—and that this oft-recurring disconnect lies at the root of much wartime civil-military tension.

Part of series

Modern War Studies
Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University Press of Kansas
Publication date

May 1, 2007
Dimensions

6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0700615121
ISBN-13

978-0700615124
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Andrew Sangster
29
Hardcover
37 offers from $23.15

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Through the experiences of the British Army in World War II, shows the indispensable importance of the primacy of civilian control of a nation’s armed forces and of the requirement to maintain effective civil-military relations between the home government and commanders in the field. As such this study has tremendous relevance today."—Army History

"A deeply thoughtful and original work and a landmark in Churchill studies."—Historian

"Callahan is a reflective and judicious senior historian who is interested equally in Churchill and his generals and who knows enough about the war to view with humane detachment the significance of their relationships for the men fighting under their orders. The result is a heavyweight contribution to the war effort as a whole, together with some lively engagement in its accompanying controversies."—Journal of Cold War Studies

"This is a work of fresh insights in at least two significant respects. Some of Callahan’s footnotes are mini bibliographic essays that highlight gaps in the literature that still need to be filled. But even more important, Callahan has bridged the gap in much of the recent literature between the British and the British-Indian Armies."—Journal of Military History

"Thoroughly grounded in the published literature and some of the unpublished personal papers related to the subject, the book, well written and cogently argued. It deserves to be read widely."—International History Review

"Incisive and informed, yet highly readable, this excellent book will surprise and provoke even those who think they really know the Second World War. It puts Churchill in his place, firmly yet fairly. Ranging across North Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Callahan turns Britain's 'Forgotten Army' in Burma into the memorable centerpiece of this vivid story."—David Reynolds, author of In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

"A very fine and compelling work by a seasoned scholar and superior to John Keegan’s Churchill’s Generals. It’s a pleasure to read."—Harold R. Winton, author of To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927–1938

From the Back Cover

"Incisive and informed, yet highly readable, this excellent book will surprise and provoke even those who think they really know the Second World War. It puts Churchill in his place, firmly yet fairly. Ranging across North Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Callahan turns Britain's 'Forgotten Army' in Burma into the memorable centerpiece of this vivid story."-David Reynolds, author of In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

"A very fine and compelling work by a seasoned scholar and superior to John Keegan's Churchill's Generals. It's a pleasure to read."-Harold R. Winton, author of To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927-1938

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University Press of Kansas (May 1, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0700615121
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0700615124
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,525,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,350 in Military Strategy History (Books)
- #14,214 in Great Britain History (Books)
- #23,491 in World War II History (Books)

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Gilberto Villahermosa

Great Britain's World War II Army and Its Commanders

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 10, 2007

Verified Purchase

The British Army of World War II began the war deficient in leadership, doctrine, equipment, and training, leading to a series of military debacles in Europe and the Pacific between 1940 and 1942 that overshadowed the army and its commanders for the remainder of the war. By 1945, however, it had evolved into an effective fighting force, despite manpower shortages that forced British generals to adopt caution in their operations and eventually led to the disbanding of some seven divisions.

In "Churchill and His Generals" author Raymond Callahan focuses on Great Britains key military leaders and formations: the Eighth Army, which fought in North Africa and Italy; the Second Army, which fought in Northwestern Europe from D-Day to the end of the war; and the Fourteenth Army, which fought in Burma.

It was the Fourteenth Army which emerged as the greatest fighting force of the war. It's commander, General William Slim, is described by Callahan as "the finest British general since Wellington" for it was he that built and transformed that army it into the best of Great Britiain's World War II formations. Unfortunately, for Slim and his veterans, the Fourteenth received little recognition from Winston Churchill for their tremendous contributions to the defeat of the Japanese in Burma.

Despite his reputation as one of the greatest British leaders of World War II, Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery emerges as a commander who had not advanced beyond 1918 tactically and the legitimate descendant of the generals of World War I. After the years of defeats, retreats and evacuations, the ascendency of the Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke - Field Marshal Mongomery team, meant a return to tactical and operational caution (reinforced by manpower concerns). Victory through firepower at an acceptable cost in lives became the aim - and the British Army delivered those victories.

Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, consistently denigrated and undervalued by both Montgomery and Brooke, emerges as a capable soldier as well as the closest thing the British Army had to an Eisenhower-style coalition commander.

The major shortcoming of this work is that it is a synthesis of secondary sources and relies heavily on the postwar memoirs of most of the British commanders of the Second World War. Unfortunately, in those memoirs, Great Britiain's World War II military leaders spend a great deal of energy disparaging each other. The attentive reader is left wondering if Callahan has not presented Great Britian's World War II Army and its commanders too negatively.

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Bill Weidner

Gifted Writer - Connects British Politics with Strategy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 16, 2013

Churchill & His Generals (Modern War Studies)

Raymond Callahan's book on Prime Minister Winston Churchill and His Generals is absolutely first rate. His book is one of the very few historically honest, 'warts and all,' accounts of British political leadership and the British Army during World War II. He explains exactly how Churchill's political problems developed. He explained how and why British Army structural and doctrinal problems developed during the war and how they influenced the Anglo-American Alliance.

Callahan wrote that, "Britain fielded the smallest army of any major combatant." p. 4. Very early in the war it was apparent that even the smaller British Army could not be kept up to strength. Callahan said that it became obvious the British Army had problems when it was compared to the German Army. "'Compared to the (German)enemy British training appeared, even at its best, to have produced an army over-deliberate, slow, reactive.' This unease, a sense that something was fundamentally wrong, would steadily deepen over the next two years." p. 23.

Therein lays the problem. As Callahan wrote, "For a nation that still aspired to Great-Power status, full participation in the defeat of Germany was essential. But demography (small population) counseled prudence, and unreadiness ... made the cost of imprudence unusually high." p. 4. When the Americans joined the fight in North Africa, "... the war moved into a new phase,one in which the issue for Churchill would be not whether the British Army could win but how to shape victory to support British interests." p. 146.

The U.S. Army gave British leaders the manpower and material support they needed to win the war against Nazi Germany. That was a given, but now they needed to harness the growing might of the U.S. Army to British strategic objectives. Raymond Callahan provides the best example of how British politics influenced Allied strategy and why, from Prime Minister Churchill's point of view, "...British battlefield success was politically essential...." p. 187.

In addition to their ongoing manpower problems, The British Army in WW II faced both structural and doctrinal problems. The old British regimental system did not lend itself well to the development of combined arms operations. Infantry, armor and artillery units were often at odds instead of working together. This problem was exacerbated by the top British field commander during the war, Bernard L. Montgomery. Montgomery, the so-called 'Master of the Set-Piece Battle,' insisted on using WW I infantry tactics on WW II battlefields. Callahan quotes T.H. Place saying, "... It was 'disgraceful' that 'infantry tactics ultimately advanced little from the standards of 1916.'" p. 214. Callahan laments the fact that Montgomery had also gotten the training doctrine for tank-infantry cooperation wrong and the fact that C.I.G.S. Alan Brooke was the only man in the British Army who could have overruled him. But Brooke, an old artillery officer from the First War, agreed with Montgomery, in fact, Brooke thought Montgomery was the best British general in centuries. "All this might have mattered less if Montgomery had been correct. Unfortunately, he was not." p. 214.

Montgomery's slow motion tactics, their set-piece planning and their reliance on massive artillery and air force bombardments were all calculated to keep down British infantry casualties. Montgomery was charged by his Prime Minister with producing victories 'at acceptable cost.' Churchill, wrote Callahan, "...understood that Britain's diminishing influence in the Grand Alliance would erode even more rapidly if the drain of casualties made the British Army unable to bear a significant share of the fighting in northwest Europe." p. 217.

In spite of Montgomery's best efforts it proved to be impossible to keep British casualties low. The truth was that WW I infantry tactics almost guaranteed high casualties. Montgomery had to break up 59th Infantry Division in August 1944 and 50th Infantry Division in November to make good losses in other divisions. The result was that the British tried to use the Americans and Canadians for any of the hard fighting, while giving Second British Army the honors of crossing the Rhine. Callahan wrote, "Even if Goodwood ... revealed how faulty British doctrine still was, the army with which Montgomery would fight the rest of the war was now past major structural and doctrinal change. All that could be done was to use it cautiously, husbanding its strength to maintain a credible British military contribution." p. 218.

"Churchill and His Generals" is not simply another WW II history book. There are thousands of those. Raymond Callahan's book is extremely important to understanding why Churchill and his generals behaved as they did during the war. Callahan details the critical connection between British politics and Montgomery's unusual battlefield behavior. Very simply, it is one of the best military history books you will ever read.

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Historical Churchill

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 12, 2019

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Sir Wins6on Churcill was a very interesting person. I remember some achievements in his life due to the previous eras of my life. It is intriguing to follow other facets of his life and image. A well worth while book, like others in this series. Thoroughly recommend this historical read. Thanks for the opportunity to read it.

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