New Churchill's biography sounds like another episode of the Simpsons - there are thousands of them. And yet this one is unique and worth reading. Why? Three reasons:
a] It's short and easy to read
b] It covers military issues superbly
c] It`s not excessively eulogistic
I think some American anglophiles and some fervent Churchillians may be disappointed with the book. They might feel that WSC has received an unfair treatment. But Churchill, a human, has become a myth, particularly in North America. John Keegan writes that he was just a man, a strange man full of contradictions. "A devoted husband and father, he was, by the account of his favorite and deeply loving daughter, Mary, in her 1979 biography of her mother, difficult at home and often impossible (page 186)."
Another contradiction of Churchill was one of a strategist. He had repeatedly stressed the importance of air power, more than any other civilian statesmen. Yet when it came to action, he could not resist the call of tradition and romance, and imagined that the Royal Navy could still assert the old supremacy unaided. The mistake of the Norwegian campaign was to be repeated in the Mediterranean, and still more disastrously in Singapore.
For me, myself being a Russian, Churchill is a paradox: he was both Russophobe and Russophile. He often referred to the Russians as "crocodiles". Keegan goes positive on Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech. I disagree: WSC demanded a unified Anglo-American front against Russia which he described as a triumphalist and expansionist victor state. Russia ostensibly was about to overrun the Western Europe in March 1946. It was manifestly untrue: not only Stalin had no desire to spread communism outside his "sphere of influence", Russia had 20 million dead and was lying in ruins, its many European cities completely flattened, not unlike Hiroshima. In my view it was a sop to Truman and his band of hard-liners who had already decided on the policy of containment of Russia anyway. But it was Churchill who officially started the "Red Peril".
Yet when Germany suddenly attacked Russia on June 22, 1941 Churchill was the only statesman in the UK (or the US) who spoke about reaching out and supporting Russia. It contrasted drastically with his anti-communism and russophobia he had displayed only a few weeks before. Churchill said on June 22 1941: "I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying-down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey."
This passage demonstrates amply the most important thing about Churchill - he was a master of his language, a maestro of metaphor, and he used words as weapons of power. This brief but wonderful book gives us a good taste of that.
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Ian W. Craig
DISAPOINTMENT FOR THIS CHURCHILL FAN !!
Reviewed in Canada on October 9, 2019
