Churchill as war leader. Winston Spencer Churchill (1874–1965) possessed talents which, like those of his famous predecessor William Pitt, were peculiarly fitted to war. Character and experience provided him, uniquely among the ‘Big Three’ (see Grand Alliance), with an awesome armoury of knowledge, ideas and first-hand observations of war which worked along with simple but powerful political instincts. He was a strategist in every fibre of his being, though he did not always adhere to the classical principles he liked to cite in defence of his pet schemes. His earlier life was in many ways an ideal preparation for the task he undertook on 10 May 1940 and he embarked upon the war with a self-confidence which was entirely justified. ‘I thought I knew a great deal about it all,’ he later wrote, ‘and I was sure I should not fail.’

1. Background and preparation

Between 1895 and 1898 Churchill experienced the world of late Victorian soldiering, first in Cuba and then with the Malakand Field Force before finally taking part in the battle of Omdurman. He also saw ‘modern war’ at first hand in South Africa (1899–1902) and then on the Western Front in 1915–16. These two kinds of experience blended to produce what the wartime chiefs of staff often found an infuriatingly simple ‘front soldier’ mentality together with an acute awareness of the role of modern technology in war (see MD1, for example). His tenure of most of the major offices of state, but most importantly his time as First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–15), gave him invaluable insights into the conduct of war at the highest levels, which he pondered deeply during the inter-war years, and an enormous fund of practical experience which together were to influence the way he ran the war from 1940 onwards.

The First World War taught Churchill the importance of avoiding any repetition of the bitter and disastrous split between civilian ministers and military leaders—the ‘frocks’ versus the ‘brasshats’—which, he thought, had bedevilled the conduct of that war. Sure political control and an effective machinery for collaborative decision-making were the legacies the Great War bequeathed to its successor. The Admiralty's reluctance to introduce convoying until April 1917, and its subsequent success, encouraged him to be sceptical of professionals and reinforced a natural tendency to think that in military matters the experts were often wrong and the politicians frequently right. His profound disappointment at the unimaginativeness of generals such as Haig and Robertson helped, in the Second World War, to sustain his faith in unconventional soldiers such as Wingate and those who were out of favour like Hobart, as well as these who were out of date ( Keyes, for example). His admiration for Marshal Foch's ‘obstinate combativeness’ found its echo in the varying treatment he accorded to Air Chief Marshal Harris, General Wavell, General Auchinleck, Admiral Cunningham, and General Montgomery. In short, Churchill handled his commanders in the later war very much on the basis of general views formed in the earlier one.

Churchill ended the First World War with a body of firm strategic beliefs which he carried over into 1940 and, although keenly aware of the importance of applied science in war (see operational research, for example), he remained convinced that nothing really altered these strategic principles; on 5 September 1939 he remarked that he did not believe the ‘essential elements’ of war would be altered by the air arm. A devout navalist, Churchill was and ever remained a convinced proponent of amphibious warfare. The stress he laid on amphibious operations came from a broad conception of strategic manoeuvre and a conviction of the value of putting pressure on an opponent at varying points on his strategic periphery where his communications would be most stretched. It also came from his conception of the war as being divided between a ‘main’ theatre, where final victory must be won, and ‘subsidiary’ theatres where it was legitimate to take a ‘war gamble’.

These ideas reappeared repeatedly during the Second World War—not least because of Churchill's propensity to recycle a strategic plan to meet a new situation—as did his broad strategic conception of how to conduct large-scale, multi-theatre war. ‘Tendencies,’ he told the House of Commons on 15 November 1915, ‘are far more important than…episodes.’ Sensational victories were not necessary in order to win the war; rather the enemy should be worn down, premature offensives on the main front avoided, machines used as substitutes for manpower, and manoeuvre employed also to reduce slaughter.

Churchill learned much more from the First World War; his inter-war study of his ancestor John, Duke of Marlborough, merely confirmed his sense of the special problems of coalition warfare and of the paramount importance of integrating Allied military efforts. One further aspect of that experience would have a critical influence on the way in which Churchill fought the Second World War: his use of intelligence. Churchill had first realized the value of well-organized field intelligence during his service with Kitchener in the Sudan in 1898. From November 1914, with the three main German naval codes in Admiralty hands, he saw at first hand how intelligence might be integrated into operations—and how its insights could be squandered. While at the Admiralty he read every individual ‘flimsy’ (decoded signal) and he continued to read intercepts as a cabinet minister after 1918, attaching the highest importance to them. Although out of office, he was given intelligence material after 1931 with the express permission of Ramsay MacDonald and his successors. As a result, Churchill entered the Second World War convinced of the crucial importance of signals intelligence warfare and of the need to co-ordinate multiple intelligence agencies to achieve maximum operational benefits. His possession of knowledge which his generals frequently lacked reinforced his inclinations to urge them into action.

Much of the Churchillian character had been evident during the First World War: the mixture of romanticism and pragmatism, an adamantine persistence and perseverance, enormous fecundity of mind, and great courage and humour. Less in evidence were its darker sides, which included insensitivity and a tendency unjustly to hound those—especially in the middle ranks—who upset him and his calculations. To achieve his purposes, he used during the Second World War an arsenal into which he had not reached before. ‘His battery of weapons,’ Admiral John Godfrey, war-time director of Naval Intelligence, recalled, ‘included persuasion, real or simulated anger, mockery, vituperation, tantrums, ridicule, derision, abuse and tears.’

2. First Lord of the Admiralty, 1939–40

On 3 September 1939, at the age of 64, Churchill returned to the Admiralty after an absence of 24 years. The signal ‘Winston is back’ went round the fleet. At once he went into action, ordering the fitting of radar to all naval vessels (denied all but three of them by pre-war economizing), instituting a convoy system, arming merchant ships, improving the defences of the anchorages at Rosyth and Scapa Flow and urging the construction of cheap anti-submarine escort vessels. Enthusiastically but unrealistically, he urged that 40 divisions be readied within the next twelve months (Churchill was a member of the Land Forces Committee which made recommendations to the war cabinet about policy; characteristically he dissented from them!). Also, embarking on what was to be a long-running but fruitless enterprise, he urged that Turkey be drawn into a Balkan Front.

Whilst galvanizing the navy into activity, Churchill also began to draw on the seemingly inexhaustible reserves of his strategic imagination. Plans to float mines down the Rhine (ROYAL MARINE) and to move British battleships into the Baltic the following spring (CATHERINE) were either launched too late or came to nothing. However his suggestion that Norwegian waters be mined was the first step in a series of events which led to the defeats at Narvik and Trondheim the following spring (see Norwegian campaign). Churchill's intention was to tighten the naval blockade of Germany by ensuring that Swedish iron ore (see Sweden, Table) no longer found its way to the Reich via Narvik and the North Sea. When, on 30 November 1939, the Finnish–Soviet war began, the opportunity beckoned to send an expeditionary force to assist the Finns by way of Norway and Sweden. In his eagerness to cut off Germany's Scandinavian ore supplies and to disregard the rights of neutrals in the process, and in his enthusiasm for fighting what he called ‘the opposite, though similar, barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism’, he was exhibiting his strategic impulsiveness at its worst. The landings in Norway, first called off when the Finns sued for peace in March 1940 and then resuscitated when the Germans unexpectedly occupied Denmark and parts of Norway on 9 April 1940, were ill-planned, poorly controlled, and confused from first to last. Churchill bore a heavy share of the responsibility for this failure, which he privately acknowledged after the war, and was lucky to escape censure. He was saved by the start of the German offensive in the west on 10 May (see FALL GELB) and his appointment as prime minister the same day.

While still First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill, although happy to be in operational control of the most active of the three services, was soon deeply unhappy with Neville Chamberlain's methods of running the war. A small war cabinet, attended by the three service ministers and the Chiefs of staff (who did not have a vote), had been set up, but after a meeting on 21 September, at which the military resisted the notion of extending the war into the Balkans, Churchill suggested to Chamberlain that the politicians might meet without the servicemen being present. Chamberlain's response was to set up the ill-fated Military Co-ordination Committee under the chairmanship of Lord Chatfield, minister for the co-ordination of defence, which comprised the three service ministers and the minister for supply, assisted by the service chiefs. This merely added another layer to the decision-making structure without enhancing political authority, as Churchill soon found out. Chatfield resigned on 3 April 1940 and after a week in the chair Churchill told Chamberlain that the committee needed the weight of prime ministerial authority to achieve anything. The Norwegian campaign demonstrated its weaknesses.

One event of great significance occurred during Churchill's first weeks at the Admiralty. Early in October 1939 he received a letter from Roosevelt, dated 11 September, inviting the First Lord to keep the president ‘in touch personally with anything you want me to know about . . .’ After gaining war cabinet approval on 5 October, Churchill replied. In the next seven months the two exchanged a handful of messages about naval matters, Churchill signing himself ‘Former Naval person’. Thereafter the correspondence increased dramatically until, on Roosevelt's death, the two leaders had exchanged 1,949 written messages and telegrams, a figure which testifies to the central importance of the USA in Churchill's policy. From the outset of the war he banked on American aid; gradually, he won it.

3. Prime minister

(a) 1940–1

When Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940—by uncharacteristically staying silent and permitting Lord Halifax to offer to serve under him without reciprocating—he was at once absorbed in the rush of events which led, six weeks later, to the fall of France. His immediate reactions were, naturally enough, shaped by visions of static fronts, lines of resistance and the careful deployment of reserves, operational methods which no longer fitted the Wehrmacht's timetable. His emotional response to France's plight took the form of aid (particularly aeroplanes) and the somewhat bizarre offer of Anglo-French union; but sheer military realism, in the shape partly of advice from Air Chief Marshal Dowding and partly of innate good sense, ensured that he never risked bringing the UK down with France. By 24 June, Churchill and the British people and empire stood all but alone. This position did not worry the prime minister unduly for he had a massive and unshakeable conviction in final victory in what he saw as a Manichaean struggle between the forces of civilization and of barbarism. The road to that victory, however, was neither obvious nor easy.

On succeeding Chamberlain, Churchill moved swiftly and purposefully to simplify and re-vitalize the organization for making high-level strategic decisions. Appointing himself minister for defence, with the king's approval, he set up a Defence Committee comprising two panels for operations and supply, though as the war went on he substituted it for the former ‘staff conferences’ at which he and the chiefs of staff debated strategy without the company of the service ministers. To service his needs as strategic co-ordinator of the war, he took over the military section of the war cabinet secretariat under its head, Major-General Ismay. Ismay's formal position was as the premier's principal staff officer and personal representative on the Chiefs of Staff committee; in practice, he soon became an indispensable go-between and with his small team, headed by Colonels Leslie Hollis and Ian Jacob, became what Churchill called his ‘handling machine’.

As part of the process of building a war machine, Churchill reconstructed his team of service heads. He saw no reason to change the First Sea Lord he had inherited, Pound, a workaholic who was prepared to tolerate a good deal of prime ministerial interference in naval detail and who often failed either to stand up to Churchill or to protect his subordinates. Dill replaced Ironside as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in May 1940. The partnership was an unhappy one, partly because of Dill's reserved temperament and partly because he differed with Churchill over the relative importance of Egypt and the Far East. On Christmas Day 1941 he was replaced by Brooke, who had the mixture of resilience and combativeness necessary to restrain the frequent flights of Churchillian fancy, and who took over the chairmanship of the chiefs of staff committee in March 1942. In the summer of 1940 the retiring Chief of Air Staff, Newall, was replaced by Portal who, possessing considerable intellectual powers, an aloof personality, and a capacity for hard work, soon earned Churchill's respect. Together this troika provided the professional ballast which was essential if Churchill's strategic imagination was to remain tethered to reality.

After the immediate likelihood of invasion had passed, Churchill told the Defence Committee not to worry if they could not see how victory would be achieved, as during the First World War such a question could not have been answered as late as August 1918. Behind this insouciance, however, lay a clear political and strategic conception of how to fight and win the war. That vision was formulated and refined during the years 1940–1 and Churchill never really departed from it thereafter.

Politically, Churchill's dominant objective was to woo the USA to support the UK and entangle it so closely in the war that eventually it must become a belligerent. The destroyers-for-bases deal he negotiated from May to August 1940 was the first step, and although in concrete terms the bargain undoubtedly favoured the USA, the spirit of co-operation in which it was struck was an important step along the road to alliance. In December 1940 a dramatic letter from Churchill highlighted the UK's near-bankruptcy, prompting Roosevelt to introduce Lend-Lease, vital for the UK's war effort. Increasing collaboration reached its first climax in August 1941 when the two leaders met at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, and signed the Atlantic Charter. Churchill regarded the charter, which was cast in general terms, as an interim statement of war aims; more cynically, one member of his government saw it as ‘mainly a dodge to get the US a little bit further into the war’. As part of his scheme to entangle the USA in a de facto military partnership, Churchill was prepared to cede the Pacific to America, thereby virtually handing over Britain's Far Eastern policy. Given the calls on the UK's meagre resources, he had little choice but to do so.

By October 1940, Churchill had devised the broad outlines of a strategy to defeat Hitler. In the immediate future only bombing offered a way to weaken Germany; but beyond that he envisaged a three-stage war in which bombing and blockade in 1940 were followed by medium-sized amphibious operations in 1941 and larger-scale attacks at a number of points on the European coastline in 1942. The details of this picture changed as the war developed—the entry of the USSR into the war in June 1941, for example, meant that Britain no longer had to rely on indirect methods of weakening the German war machine—and the dates moved back, but the essence remained the same. Germany had to be weakened by a combination of internal and external pressures before the coup de grâce could be delivered from points on the continental periphery.

Marshal Graziani's half-hearted attack on Egypt on 13 September 1940 (see Western Desert campaigns) and the Italian attack on Greece the following month (see Balkan campaign) dictated the first major steps in Churchill's war. As the corner-stone of the imperial arch which stretched to India and the Far East, the Middle East had to be defended. Churchill was more than willing to wage a large-scale war there, for as well as offering the military opportunity to invade Sicily or Sardinia and put pressure on Italy, success might persuade Vichy France to change sides and Spain to remain neutral. Early victories won by Lt-General O'Connor in the Western Desert were reversed after Rommel's arrival in February 1941; and Wavell's disastrous adherence to the plan to intervene in Greece helped seal his fate as C-in-C Middle East. Armed with ULTRA decrypts, in some of which Rommel gave a deliberately misleading picture of his position to his superiors, Churchill prodded first Wavell and then his successor, Auchinleck, to attack and was displeased when the latter refused to do so until late autumn.

In purely military terms, the first half of 1941 was not a good time for Churchill. The sinking of the Bismarck in May lightened the gloom a little, but the battle of the Atlantic proved worrying. However, the entry into the war first of the USSR and then of the USA wholly changed the picture. In December 1941 Churchill rushed to Washington to propose a major Anglo-American campaign in North Africa (GYMNAST) in 1942 as the first step in his strategy to crush the European Axis.

(b) 1942–3

The USA's entry into the war, Churchill wrote on 12 December 1941, ‘makes the end certain’. More immediately it offered him the chance to dominate Allied strategy. America had yet to mobilize its war machine, a task which would take some two years; in the meantime, the UK had both a strategy and an active operation (CRUSADER) which seemed about to defeat Rommel. At the ARCADIA conference ( 22 December 1941– 14 January 1942), Roosevelt accepted both Churchill's proposal for an immediate campaign in North Africa and his long-term strategic outline for Anglo-American landings in Europe in 1943 and the possible liberation of the continent in late 1943 or 1944.

Almost immediately, Roosevelt's generals objected. Churchill's favoured indirect strategy—they christened it ‘periphery pecking’—was out of tune with their preference for a massive concentrated thrust directly into the heart of Germany and their immediate wish to relieve pressure on the USSR. In April, Churchill apparently accepted the American alternative—a small preliminary landing in France in 1942 (SLEDGEHAMMER) followed by the main invasion (ROUND-UP, later OVERLORD) in 1943—but by July he was refusing to countenance the earlier operation. His reasons were sound: SLEDGEHAMMER, which would have to be largely British, would be no more than a pin-prick because of lack of landing craft and equipment, and the German position was still far too strong for there to be any reasonable hope of success. Having promised the Soviets a Second Front in Europe in 1942, and without SLEDGEHAMMER, Roosevelt had no choice but to fall in with Churchill's North African strategy. The TORCH landings which began the North African campaign took place on 8 November 1942 and Axis forces were finally cleared from North Africa six months later after a stiff last-ditch resistance. In American minds, the first seeds of doubt about Churchill's commitment to a major European land campaign had been sown.

Although Churchill showed great skill in managing his relations with Roosevelt over strategic questions, he was able to dominate Anglo-American strategy in 1942 more by default than through having secured complete consensus. Over diplomatic issues the differences between Roosevelt and himself became more quickly apparent. Churchill's general conception of the post-war structure of Europe was vague; but as a practical politician he recognized the benefit of acknowledging the USSR's claims to its June 1941 frontiers, even though this ran counter to the Atlantic Charter. Roosevelt emphatically disagreed, preferring to leave all territorial questions to a peace conference, so Churchill dropped the proposal. However, the disagreement was symptomatic of a growing divergence between the two men over international affairs.

Churchill's relations with his other great ally, Stalin, were quite unlike those with Roosevelt. From the moment that Germany attacked the USSR he showed a readiness to put aside his deep loathing of communism to support a fellow combatant. Beaverbrook's mission to Moscow (see Three Power conference) in September 1941 had adopted a policy of ‘aid without strings’ and Churchill continued to set great store by keeping the supply lines to the USSR open. Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union became an important substitute for a European Second Front and territorial agreements, but the Allies were for various reasons unable to reach the goals agreed in the aid protocols. The disaster to one of the Arctic convoys, PQ17, in July 1942 forced the UK to suspend them, and in August Churchill flew to Moscow to explain that TORCH was to be the substitute for a European Second Front that year. Aid to the USSR by sea was further curtailed by the North African and Sicilian campaigns, and by the U-boat successes in the Atlantic. Churchill always remained acutely conscious of this and of the fact that the Soviets were bearing the brunt of the fighting, and repeatedly chided his generals by pointing out that there were 185 German divisions on the Russian Front.

By 1943 Churchill had been carrying the burden of war leadership for three years, yet a never-ending stream of memoranda and instructions still poured from his pen, directed at improving the war effort at every level from the most exalted to the most humble. One example can stand for them all. On 19 April 1943, six days after the announcement of the Katyń Forest massacre, and while deeply absorbed in military events in North Africa and Burma, Churchill found time to complain to the minister of agriculture that ‘you have discontinued the small sugar ration which was allowed to bees, and which is most important to their work throughout the whole year.’ His personal concern for efficiency at every level was one of the most striking features of Churchill's style of war leadership. In pursuit of this goal he insisted that memoranda should be written on no more than a single sheet of paper and frequently demanded ‘action this day’ of subordinates when he felt that bureaucracy was dragging its heels.

Churchill drove himself hard but drove his subordinates harder, for they had to fit into the rhythm of his working day. The early part of the morning he frequently spent in bed or in his dressing-gown reading and dictating, before settling down to a round of meetings and discussions. No matter what the circumstances he almost always found time for a two-hour nap in mid-afternoon, from which he emerged refreshed and reinvigorated. Early evening business was followed by a lengthy dinner, at which he conversed with relish with his staff and invited guests, and then for preference by the screening of a film: his taste was for patriotic and romantic costume dramas. It was often nearly midnight before agnostic military leaders were challenged to debate and defend their views, which were on occasion completely opposed to the prime minister's, and well into the small hours of the morning before they crawled gratefully into bed. Churchill assisted himself not merely by controlling the working day but by selecting loyal and able personal assistants, such as John Colville and John Martin, who ran his private office, and Desmond Morton, his personal link with the intelligence community upon whose output he placed such heavy reliance.

The dispatch of the Prince of Wales and Repulse to Malaya in 1941 was an ill-fated intervention in Far Eastern strategy, and during 1942 Churchill took little hand in it as British forces evacuated Burma and then dealt with the ‘Congress Revolt’ in India (see India, 3). At the Casablanca conference in January 1943 (see SYMBOL) he committed Britain to an amphibious operation on the Arakan coast of Burma aimed at recapturing Rangoon (ANA KIM) devised by Wavell in India. It was beyond Britain's strength and resources at that time, and as an alternative the British planners suggested CULVERIN, a landing on northern Sumatra. Churchill seized it with alacrity. It matched his preference for amphibious operations; it would force the Japanese to disperse their forces and launch a strong counter-attack; and it presented an attractive alternative to a bloody land campaign to recapture Burma.

At Casablanca, Churchill and his chiefs of staff succeeded in persuading a reluctant American delegation to accept a ‘follow-on’ strategy in the Mediterranean, immediately involving the invasion of Sicily (HUSKY). At the same conference, and with Churchill's foreknowledge and concurrence, Roosevelt announced the goal of ‘unconditional surrender’.

At the Washington Conference in May 1943 (see TRIDENT), Churchill encountered the same objections to his Far Eastern strategy as his preference for operations in Italy and the Adriatic would soon confront: that such an attack would be costly, ineffective, and directed against a secondary objective. Distrustful of the fighting capacity of the Indian Army, Churchill stuck to CULVERIN throughout the summer and autumn of 1943 against the opposition of the Americans and the doubts of the British planners in South-East Asia Command.

At Washington Churchill was forced to agree to an invasion of France in May 1944. Thereafter through the autumn he pressed insistently for operations in central and northern Italy and the Balkans and against the Dodecanese Islands, even at the cost of delaying OVERLORD. His strategy, which aroused increasing American ire, had changed: initially founded in military perceptions, it was now increasingly fuelled by political considerations as the prospect of Soviet control of the Balkans began to loom. He made further efforts, all fruitless, to entice Turkey into the war immediately and, in an attempt to shape global strategy to his own ends, opposed proposals for a landing on the Andaman Islands off Burma (BUCCANEER), which both British and American staffs favoured, in order to have enough naval craft for his favoured Mediterranean ventures. Finally, he manoeuvred to avoid the presence of a Soviet delegate at the first Cairo conference in November 1943 (see SEXTANT) which preceded his meeting with Stalin at Teheran (see Eureka) since he would simply ‘bay for a second front’.

(c) 1944–5

By the end of 1943 the balance of authority in the Anglo-American alliance had passed from Churchill to Roosevelt. This was the inevitable result of the enormous expansion of American productive power: by 1943 the USA was producing three times the British volume of munitions and providing up to half Britain's requirement of tanks, landing craft, and transport aircraft. Churchill felt the consequences of this shift at Teheran, when Stalin added his voice to that of Roosevelt and expressed a decided preference for OVERLORD rather than extending the Italian Front north to the Po and across the Adriatic. Although the conference ended with expressions of unanimity and personal esteem, Churchill was now to grow increasingly out of step with his two partners in strategic matters.

On 23 January 1944 the prime minister took the chair at the first of a series of weekly meetings to review the progress of OVERLORD planning. This characteristic concern for detail did not, however, mean that he had abandoned his Mediterranean gambit. His deeply rooted preference for a ‘flanking strategy’ produced proposals for operations in Norway (JUPITER) and in Turkey and the Aegean should OVERLORD fail: and between June and August he struggled vainly to have the planned landings in southern France (see French Riviera landings)—also agreed at Teheran—abandoned in favour of forcing the Germans out of northern Italy and driving on Trieste. These proposals, which confirmed American convictions that Churchill's strategy was founded in a determination to maintain and safeguard the interests of the British Empire at all costs, were in considerable part an impulsive and pragmatic reaction to German decrypts which exposed the vulnerability of enemy positions on the Po. They were also the consequence of a new element in Churchill's thinking: a belief that political considerations which were now emerging ought to exert a major influence on strategy.

By 1944 Churchill had realized that the advance of the Red Army would settle the political status of areas such as the Baltic States regardless of the niceties of international law. There was an unresolved ambivalence in his attitude towards the Soviet Union and the prospects for post-war co-operation: on the one hand he loathed communism as anti-democratic and irreligious, while on the other he professed to believe that the Soviets respected the West and were prepared to work with it. This view was partly the product of a delusion that Stalin was personally a reasonable man but was frequently the victim of pressure from hard-liners in the Politburo. Ever a pragmatist, Churchill moved to keep Greece out of the Kremlin's sphere of influence, proposing in May 1944 that Britain take the lead there in return for a reciprocal Soviet dominance in Romania. This grew into the ‘percentages agreement’ of October 1944 (see TOLSTOY) and reflected a realist's view of the shape of post-war European relations.

More immediately, Churchill grew increasingly concerned over the failure to shape Allied military strategy so as to diminish the area of post-war Soviet control in central and south-eastern Europe. This was why he pressed the case for a major effort in Italy in August 1944: by forcing a passage north-east towards Vienna, the West might avoid Yugoslavia and Austria falling under Soviet sway. For the same reason he opposed Eisenhower's ‘broad front’ strategy in Europe and, in April 1945, the supreme commander's order not to advance on Berlin but to move instead towards Leipzig and Dresden. His foresight failed to convince an American leadership which divorced strategy from policy and which set great store by Roosevelt's belief that he could deal with Stalin on a personal basis. On 30 April 1945, after Roosevelt's death, Churchill urged President Truman to liberate Prague and western Czechoslovakia, but the new American leader proved as resistant to his logic as his predecessor had been.

Although Churchill had reluctantly to accept American—and Soviet—strategic preferences in the west, he obdurately refused to do so in the east. He greeted Stalin's announcement at Teheran that the USSR would enter the war against Japan with elation because it eliminated the need to commit additional British forces to the Burma campaign. His professional advisers favoured either making a substantial naval contribution to the Pacific war or what became known as the ‘middle strategy’—combined Anglo-Australian operations in the south-west Pacific under MacArthur. Churchill refused to countenance either course. Instead he pushed CULVERIN for all he was worth, despite the revelation that its enormous shipping requirements would delay it until March 1945, largely for political reasons: if Britain merely provided a subsidiary naval force and trailed along ‘at the heels of the American fleet’, it risked losing control of Malaya to some American-inspired world organization. Relations between Churchill and his chiefs of staff came as close to breaking-point over this issue as they ever would and in March 1944 Ismay warned him of the possibility of resignations.

Paradoxically, Churchill's eastern strategy was undermined by events just when his western strategy was being devised to take advantage of them. The speed of the American advance in the Pacific in the summer of 1944 turned Sumatra into a backwater; and the successes of Slim's army in Burma made the ‘middle strategy’ an irrelevance. Nevertheless, Churchill stuck obstinately to CULVERIN and at the Quebec conference in September 1944 (see OCTAGON) made an offer of the British fleet (see Task Force 57) to assist the Americans in the Pacific hoping that it would be refused. Then he would be free to launch his much-favoured and economical amphibious attack on Sumatra. Roosevelt's immediate acceptance of the offer brought his strategy to a complete halt.

Churchill attended his last conference with Roosevelt at Yalta in February 1945 (see ARGONAUT). It was symptomatic of Britain's position in the partnership that Roosevelt kept from him the terms under which the USSR agreed to enter the Pacific war. By now the enormous complexity of any post-war settlement was clearly apparent, with disputes over Poland (towards which Churchill was sympathetic but exasperated as the government-in-exile refused to make territorial concessions he regarded as inescapable), over the zonal division of Germany (see also Allied Control Commissions), over the scale and type of reparations to be extracted from a defeated Germany, and a host of other problems. On 12 April 1945 Roosevelt died. His successor, Harry S Truman, continued his predecessor's policy of distancing American policy from British influence. Less than a month later, on 7 May, came the news of Germany's surrender. Churchill drank a toast to the chiefs of staff in celebration; they did not reciprocate. He gave notice of a general election and in July, in the midst of the Potsdam conference (see TERMINAL), returned to the UK and electoral defeat. What appeared to be popular ingratitude was more a gesture of support for the Labour Party, which had thought about the peace, than of disapprobation for a leader who had concentrated on winning the war.

4. Retrospect

The explanation for Churchill's successes as war leader lies as much in the organization which sustained him as in his personal qualities. Those qualities should not be belittled, however. Churchill was for many an emblematic figure, a portly British bulldog whose ‘V for Victory’ signs expressed in a cheekily vulgar way a determination not to succumb to Hitler. His emotional loathing of Nazism and his deep attachment to democracy and the monarchy fuelled his actions and inspired his oratory. They were balanced by an understanding of the importance of careful thought and rational analysis. If any risks were to be run, then they would at least be wellcalculated ones.

Churchill's concern for efficiency was as evident on the battlefield as in the office. He prodded his generals, his admirals (less so his airmen) and his bureaucrats mercilessly. Lord Cherwell (see Lindemann)—‘the Prof’—and his personal statistical office provided some of his ammunition. Ismay and his staff ensured that, notwithstanding the mercurial energies of their master, the military machinery ran as smoothly as possible. They were a ‘winning team’, as were the chiefs of staff after December 1941, and the pairings of Alexander and Montgomery in the Western Desert and Alexander and Harding in Italy. Churchill was not disposed to share his leadership with other politicians: the Dominions were never offered full partnership at the highest levels and his service ministers were never more than civil administrators. He was disposed to share it with professionals whose business was war. His success as a war leader rests on the fact that he was an enormously gifted amateur strategist—and that, ultimately, he acknowledged as much.

John Gooch

Bibliography

Gilbert, M. , Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill 1939–1941 (London, 1983).
—— Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill 1941–1945 (London, 1986).
Jacobsen, M. , ‘Winston Churchill and the Third Front’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 14 ( 1991), 337–62.
Lewin, R. , Churchill as Warlord (London, 1972).