Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945

Carlo D’Este

Harpercollins, 2008

“That right there is where we make our money,” an irascible publisher once remarked in the late 1960s, “heroic house pets, recipes a damn monkey couldn’t [mess] up, and, of course, the Churchill parade.”

That last part refers to the endless stream of books related to Winston Churchill, books that have never failed of a willing public, and books that have therefore mostly hewed close to the comforting shores of hagiography. Virtually all of Churchill’s biographers – most certainly, most loudly, and most voluminously including the man himself – make it their business to find some new and more earnest way to love him, to esteem him, to heroically affirm once again that he was a giant on the 20th century stage, the like of whom we shall never see again. From the most scholarly tomes to the lightest tossed-off glosses, all of these books, the book presently under review, and every single book on the subject that’s ever likely to be written in the future, until the Earth’s sun goes super-nova and its rapidly-expanding coronosphere consumes the planet (and, presumably, the planet’s fatuous hacks), have three things in common: they all consider their subject worth the effort, they all contain at least 134 references to “bulldog tenacity,” and they will all sell well on Father’s Day.

In 1882, another British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, pronounced, “There never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down that had either morals or principles.” But nobody believed him, and he died an unhappy man. In 1942, Harold Laski, who was a world-class liar, said of Winston Churchill, “That man is a world-class liar.” Given the two halves of the sentence, commentators were stymied. Even so sober a historian as A. J. P. Taylor could end his potted list of Churchill’s resume with the line, “The savior of his country” and expect no criticism. I think Jesus sent him a note saying “great line.”

Carlo D’Este is likewise a serious historian, author of the critically-acclaimed Decision at Normandy and weighty biographies of Eisenhower and Patton. In his new book, Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945, these credentials afford him about fifteen added seconds of viability. Then he succumbs to the Churchill parade, and the serious historian is heard from no more. If we’re all lucky, he’ll resurface in some future book, when D’Este regains his historical composure – the point (of Warlord, anyway) being that he’ll regain that composure in a brand-new villa on the Costa Brava, financed with royalty-checks earned by a book so crammed with inaccuracies, distortions, and outright lies that I kept expecting the page numbers to be misleading (they aren’t – they number sequentially from “neglected childhood” right on through to “apotheosis”). In his real life (something reading enough biographies will make you suspect he never had), Churchill had few close friends; in his literary afterlife, he has great press-gangs of them. Only the qualifications are the same: overlook the blackouts, call the dementia “eccentric,” and always be ready with a hearty “Yes!”

Frisky little debutantes to the reading of Churchilliana (similar to ‘chinchilla’ in that the subject is virtually always producing crap and is only valued skin-deep) will think that the tight focus of D’Este’s book, Churchill at war, might lend it a coherence other Churchill books lack. But oh! They’ll be wrong! Churchill spent most of his life involved in warfare, after all – rushing off to glory in the Boer War, serving as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War, and of course presiding over the Second World War, first as First Lord of the Admiralty again, then as Prime Minister and hastily-created Minister of Defense – this affords even a writer with half D’Este’s industry plenty of room to slosh around. Our author has found a marvelous quote to open his book, from Sebastian Haffner:

No one will ever understand the phenomenon that was Churchill by regarding him simply as a politician and statesman who was ultimately destined like Asquith or Lloyd George, Wilson or Roosevelt, to conduct a war; he was a warrior who realized that politics forms a part of the conduct of war.

Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? How little we understand him, if we think of him as a mere politician! He’s all along been a warrior, sometimes masquerading as a politician when it was expedient! D’Este follows up with another quote, this one from Brian Gardner:

Wellington was a soldier who felt it his duty to be a politician; Churchill was a politician who wanted to be a soldier … a nation which since Cromwell has always felt uncomfortable with all but its most eccentric military leaders , was led in its most dangerous battle by a war leader in a zip-suit and carpet slippers.

See? A warrior through-and-through who only … wait … what? “A politician who wanted to be a soldier”? Why, Gardner’s contradicting Haffner, and D’Este’s letting him! And it’s only page 3! What is a reader supposed to make of this? No doubt D’Este’s publishers will hope they rumble “bulldog tenacity” and hurry on. The book is enormous, after all – the reader has to expect some blatant contradictions of its most essential point to creep in here and there! In fact, by page 9000, it surely won’t be all that surprising if our weary author contradicts himself:

Churchill single-handedly elevated [Italian invasion Operation] Shingle from the wastebasket of discarded plans to the centerpiece in Italy, and in the process turned it into more of a political football than a military operation. Instead Anzio offered a unique opportunity for Churchill the politician to fulfill his lifelong fantasy of taking charge of a military operation and – at least temporarily – playing the role of a commanding general, a role for which he would never admit he was wholly unqualified.

Encountering a concluding line like that after reading hundreds of pages of a book called Warlord makes you want to grab the author by the lapels (or wherever) and point out to him that Churchill’s not the only one in denial on that point.

But there’s a whole lot of denial to go around in D’Este’s book – the whole thing reads like the examination-room transcript of a dream Churchill himself might have had, a dream in which his failings might have been great but his greatnesses were even greaterer, in which his “incandescent” mind was forever tossing off innovative and revolutionary military ideas, rather than pointlessly self-aggrandizing “Action This Day” memos. Warlord is a dream-diary in which Winston Churchill really is a warrior – frustrated, frustrating, visionary and often misunderstood, but still a fitting bookend to his illustrious ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, who actually led armies in the field and legendarily never lost a battle.

The only problem with all this? Dreams bear teasingly little resemblance to reality. In my dreams, I have a brace of sleek borzois who intuit my every whim; in reality, I have a flatulent basset hound who often has loud, growling arguments with her water bowl (the water bowl often outwits her).

In reality, Winston Churchill was a walking (staggering), talking (slurring) military calamity, an inept, impulsive nincompoop who should never have been allowed near a checker board, let alone a war room in which the fates of actual living beings would be decided.

His press-gang of posthumous pals always start with the fact that he was warning people about the evils of Adolf Hitler long before anybody else, that he was a lone voice crying out that this madman would not be appeased and that Britain should be readying herself for the inevitable clash with a rearmed and resurgent Germany. But the truth is he made a couple of comments to the effect that an obviously-belligerent German military dictator probably spelled trouble down the road – and plenty of his contemporaries said much the same thing from time to time - and he said the same thing about plenty of other figures on the political landscape (even the decrepit Ottoman sultans, who must have been surprised to consider themselves threats to anybody) – and he had plenty of good things to say about that “man of destiny” Mussolini. And as far as D’Este’s case is concerned, Churchill’s political pronouncements shouldn’t matter anyway; not when we have his military record to discuss.

It would be hard to find a more woeful, mistake-littered military record anywhere in the length and breadth of the twentieth century. Almost from the very first moment that young Lieutenant Churchill could make military decisions, he was making bad ones, and when he rose – by dint of tireless self-promotion and family connections – to positions of real power, in the First World War and again in the Second, he revealed a judgement as stunted and backward-looking as a medieval crusader’s. In 1914, while First Lord of the Admiralty, he was in besieged Antwerp awaiting reinforcements when he impulsively cabled Prime Minister Asquith with his offer to resign and take up field command of the troops there. The suggestion, when read out to the assembled cabinet, was met with “roars of incredulous laughter,” and when Churchill returned home he was politically crucified for his melodramatic overreaching.

“Roars of incredulous laughter” smacks of sacrilege, and D’Este, our vigilant temple watch-tabby, is quick to pounce:

The reasons for the storm of criticism over Antwerp are absolutely clear: He had made so many enemies over the years in his climb to power, dating from his first days as a war correspondent, that invariably his every action was both scrutinized and, even when successful, often harshly criticized. He was already a lightning rod of greater proportions than his flamboyant father. His immediate and rather small circle of friends was loyal, but in others Churchill seemed to inspire cruel invective; whether out of jealousy, fear, or loathing of him for having deserted the Conservative Party a decade earlier, it was all ammunition that Tory newspapers gleefully exploited.

Jealousy, fear, or sour grapes … hmmm. Waiter, is there anything else on the menu? D’Este’s zeal is commendable (or would be, if this were debate night down at the Hock & Holly instead of a work purporting to be historically reliable), but it’s possible, just possible, that intelligent, seasoned British politicians (but were they warriors?) might dislike Churchill for other reasons than schoolboy envy – like, for instance, the fact that he was “eccentric” enough to volunteer to surrender his command of the entire British navy in order to grab at the glory of dodging bullets in Belgium (not to mention the fact that the plan that stranded those men was his in the first place). Childish (some might say treasonous) behavior like doesn’t need jealousy or fear – its outraging enough on its own, but not to D’Este, who mildly concedes, “He had allowed his craving for adventure and military glory to override his primary responsibility of supervising the Royal Navy in the first desperate months of the gravest war in his nation’s history.”

Note the careful phrasing: not only is “supervising the Royal Navy” somehow transformed from the only responsibility of the First Lord to his “primary” responsibility, but Churchill is still cast as being in command – readers might not forgive a man for criminally negligent glory-hounding, but occasionally “allowing” himself to yield to a “craving”? Why, who of us hasn’t done that? And if for most of us this allowance involves the odd milkshake here and there whereas for Churchill it invariably involved the actual lives of other people, what of it? Just mutter “bulldog tenacity” and move on.

The glory-hounding doesn’t matter to D’Este, you see, because it was all so damn involuntary. According to him, the central defining characteristic of his warrior-politician, even before his loathing of politics, was his loathing of war (painting, one presumes, would have been Churchill’s true calling, if only Hitler, Mussolini, and the trumpets of destiny had left him alone for a minute). And apparently, he was the only peacenik on the whole island:

His exploits [at Omdurman in 1898, among other things taking part in the last cavalry charge in British history] left Churchill with an abhorrence of war, and during the first three decades of the twentieth century his was a frequent, often strident but forlorn voice preaching preparedness and other means of avoiding war.

And although this “peace through strength” has a nifty ring to it (where have we heard it elsewhere?), D’Este should perhaps have checked in with his subject on the subject. In this as in all things, Churchill was at least forthright (here he’s referring to the First World War). Ghoulish, but forthright: “I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering the lives of thousands every moment - & yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it.”

As with other megalomaniacal manipulators (George Patton comes to mind, and Robert E. Lee) who voiced such feelings, Churchill his entire life displayed a disregard for physical danger. His admirers – 100 percent of whom have never heard a shot fired in anger – always equate this disregard with courage, even though it’s the opposite. Courage is what tries to keep you - and those you care about – alive in the face of peril; Churchill didn’t care about physical danger because there was a large, dark, and not particularly well-hidden part of him that yearned for a storybook death. It was everything to him, the psychopathology that values the grand, romantic gesture over the hardscrabble reality. It’s why he favored – and insisted on gambling men’s lives with – foolhardy escapades like trying to force the straits of the Dardanelles during the First World War (with what goal in mind, precisely? The sacking of Constantinople? Is it any wonder the Kaiser usually laughed at the mention of Churchill’s name?), or all that pointless tank-warfare in North Africa during the Second World War (playing at knights-errant – and delaying a concerted Allied offensive by two years or more - while Hitler tightened his stranglehold on all of Europe).

This patrician indifference to the fate of other people – even his own people – is the lead item in the long bill of indictment for Churchill, and yet D’Este’s mission burns so brightly inside him that he can relate an anecdote illustrating perfectly the monster his subject was … and do it all with a perky ‘what a guy’ tone:

On another occasion [during the Second World War], as Churchill observed from his rooftop perch during an especially heavy raid, shell fragments began falling; a staff member spoke loudly to another that he was tempting Providence by remaining in harm’s way. As he was meant to, Churchill overheard the remark and replied with his patented: “My time will come when it comes,” prompting a voice in the darkness to interject: “You’re probably right, sir, but there’s no need to take half a dozen of us with you.”

(Churchill’s legitimate penchant for good quips is likewise treated in that same ‘what a guy’ fashion throughout D’Este’s book, and readers who like that sort of thing will find plenty of stories like this to satisfy them:

There was a brief firestorm in Britain when a photograph appeared in the press of Montgomery and Gen. Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, the commander of the Afrika Korps and the highest-ranking German captured at Alamein. After his capture Thoma was brought to the Eighth Army command post, where Montgomery accorded him the respect of one honorable professional soldier to another. The two dined that night, and the photograph of the two generals led Brendan Bracken to send Churchill a memo criticizing Montgomery’s naivete and noting that it created a bad impression with the public. Churchill merely commented: “I sympathise with Gen. von Thoma. Defeated, humiliated, in captivity, and,” after pausing for effect, “dinner with General Montgomery.”)

Churchiphiles will protest that such stout defiance of fate is a hallmark of the … mmmm … bulldog tenacity their idol employed to get his war-torn people through their darkest hour. They’ll protest – and D’Este will lead the charge – that Churchill-the-underdog was Churchill at his finest. But anybody’s sullen stubbornness can look like valor when his back’s against the wall; it’s better – or more instructive, anyway – to judge what a man does from a position of strength. When the unprecedentedly gigantic American intervention began to insure Allied victory in the Second World War, Churchill finally found himself possessing such strength – and what he did with it was every bit as craven and bloodthirsty as the far more publicized atrocities of his German counterpart. 40,000 dead by fire in Dresden; 60,000 dead by fire in Hamburg; the relentless shelling of devastated and helpless Berlin … and still D’Este is humming “God Save the Queen”:

Churchill’s role in the bombing of Berlin was ambiguous. [Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur] Harris did carry out a bomber offensive against the German capital from November 1943 to March 1944, and while the prime minister displayed scant interest in [Operation] Pointblank, he was enthusiastic about payback for the destruction of British cities, and about turning Berlin into the same fire-ravaged ruin as Hamburg.

But there’s no “ambiguity” in signed orders, and it wasn’t “scant interest” Churchill displayed for Operation Pointblank and its nightmarish consequences – it was indifference, complete, barbaric, dead-eyed indifference. As the Warlord himself put it: “We should never allow ourselves to apologize for what we did to Germany.” Not even if you went too far? Not even if you substituted vengeance for justice? Not even if you were wrong? No, not ever. Bulldog tenacity.

The pre-eminent grandeur that D’Este unerringly finds in his subject is reflected in his book’s outsized dimensions – it’s nearly a thousand pages long and very exhaustively end-noted – although curiously not in its page-by-page execution (the big-picture-but-not-small-picture discord is an ironic mirror of Churchill himself). Slang abounds – people ‘go ballistic,’ ‘psych out’ each other, ‘cave in’ and swallow whole pharmacies of ‘bitter pills’ – and the womenfolk never vary much from Mills and Boon stereotypes:

Asquith was neither the first nor the last to learn that Clementine Churchill was not just another pretty face – let alone the fool Beatty had called her – and that when the occasion demanded it she had very sharp claws and was unafraid to use them.

And such aren’t the only occasions where D’Este lets his tendency for lazy, hand-me-down lines to trip up the actual facts, as when he windily declares, “At an early age he had given his heart to soldiering, and the greatest tribute a military man or woman can be given is to be buried among one’s comrades in arms” about Churchill, who was, nevertheless, buried in one of the parks of Blenheim Palace, alongside not comrades in arms but his parents. But scrupulousness with this kind of detail is the province of historical objectivity, there’s precious little of that on display in Warlord. D’Este is not assessing a man or even the legend of a man – he’s cheering on a giant, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Toward the end of the book, he’s no longer troubling even to bury his partisanship in typical historian patter; he’s standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow watch-tabby Clementine (her claws temporarily sheathed) when Germany surrenders:

Clementine Churchill was still in Russia on May 8 [1945] and deeply disappointed at being unable to share her husband’s moment of triumph. From Moscow she sent him a brief telegram that read: “All my thoughts are with you on this supreme day my darling. It could not have happened without you.”

Indeed not.

(Yep, you read those indentations aright: that “indeed not” is our author, the historian, chiming in)

Despite having dragged his readers through page after page, chapter after chapter of this adoring claptrap, D’Este, as mentioned, has the gall to call the whole ordeal moot, saying on page 920 “Finally, one can do no more than look back at his extraordinary life and realize again that words alone are insufficient to portray the depth of this man and his life experience,” which he might have said on page 9 and spared us quite a few ‘what a guy’s. But that doesn’t mean D’Este has nothing to say about his celebrated warlord, oh no! On the contrary, after lots and lots of careful consideration, he’s got something very specific to say. Don’t claim you weren’t warned:

While opinions and assessments of Churchill will continue endlessly, one conclusion is beyond dispute. It is this: His romantic view of war and his inability to understand various aspects of its prosecution notwithstanding, Churchill was nevertheless the only man in Britain who could have led his nation from the dark hours of defeat with unwavering vision and bulldog tenacity.