The British journalist and historian Max Hastings has produced a number of notable books on the Second World War including Overlord, an incisive and provocative study of D-Day and the Battle of Normandy. In 2010 he published Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-45, and I cannot recommend it too highly.
The story of Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership has always been cloaked in the mists of legend, much of it generated by the great man himself. After being turned out of office in 1945, Churchill devoted himself to the production of a six-volume History of the Second World War, a narrative that Hastings calls “ruthlessly partisan.” This is just. Churchill plainly intended to write his own version of events into history, and to a remarkable extent he succeeded in doing so. Much that we believe to be true about the war—for example the existence of a special relationship between the British prime minister and the American president—was embossed on the historical record by Churchill. But as Winston’s War makes plain the reality, on this subject and many others, was somewhat at variance with the great man’s magisterial account.
This is not to say that Hastings has produced a revisionist history. His overall assessment of Churchill as a wartime leader is decidedly positive. Who else, he asks rhetorically, could have carried Britain through the great crisis of 1940-42, when the fate of the nation and indeed of the world trembled in the balance? But Hastings is not blind to Churchill’s faults as a leader, among them his amateur strategizing, his narrow-minded imperialism and his general lack of interest in domestic policy.
It surely does not diminish Churchill’s place in history to point out these flaws—which seem of minor importance when set against the heroic role he played in the great war against Nazi tyranny. Hastings obviously recognizes this; his criticisms are judicious. And these reminders that the titanic figure was, after all, composed of human clay do much to humanize the standard portrait of Churchill. By turns humorous, pugnacious, high-spirited, dejected, warm, forbidding, generous, petulant, sagacious and much mistaken, the Churchill sketched for us by Hastings is not so much cut down to size as brought into perspective.
Besides the compelling portrait of Churchill, Winston’s War is worth reading for its clear-eyed treatment of the Grand Alliance. Though much has been made of the “special relationship” between Churchill and FDR (and by extension between their countries), Hastings shows that it was largely a myth. Dire necessity, not sentimental regard, united America and Britain against Nazi Germany. Throughout the war many Americans, from senior political and military leaders to ordinary citizens, harbored a marked antipathy toward Britain. Admiral Ernest J. King, the US Chief of Naval Operations, was notorious for his Anglophobia. Nor were the British particularly enamored of their transatlantic cousins. America was widely resented in Britain for what was seen as our selfish and pusillanimous behavior prior to December 7, 1941. Yet for all this ill feeling, the Anglo-American alliance was the most successful political and military partnership between nations of all time, a point that Hastings is at some pains to make in Winston’s War.
More could be said about this Winston's War—its treatment of the relationship between Churchill and Stalin, for instance, is quite fascinating. If you have any interest in the history of the Second World War, get this book. (Incidentally, it’s available for Kindle.) Winston’s War is a must read.
