The recent film Resistance, with its portrayal of Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill as two of the great men of the Second World War, prompted me to return to a question I have often been asked as the author of Forgotten Anzacs: what are we to make of Churchill as an historical figure?
There is no shortage of answers. In conventional wisdom, Churchill is celebrated as the man who saved Britain in 1940, while others condemn him as an imperialist and racist whose reputation tells us more about Britain’s continuing attachment to its imperial past than about the man himself. The paradox of course is that both these interpretations have validity. Churchill was an ardent imperialist, a political adventurer and an extraordinarily forceful personality whose judgement could be erratic and whose interventions could be disastrous. He was also the one British political leader in 1940 capable of giving voice to a war of national survival.
His wartime Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, captured the problem rather better than most subsequent assessments: ‘God knows where we would be without him, but God knows where we shall go with him.’
The paradox is not simply that Churchill was sometimes admirable and sometimes appalling. It is that many of the same characteristics produced both outcomes.
The making of an imperial adventurer
Churchill’s first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, published in 1898, provides an unusually clear view of the young man’s political imagination. He dedicated it to the citizens of what he called the ‘Imperial Democracy of England’, hoping to stimulate their interest in ‘their great estates that lie beyond the seas’.
The phrase is revealing. There was no contradiction for Churchill between democracy at home and imperial rule abroad. The metropolitan citizen possessed political rights while simultaneously subjugating by force peoples who possessed no equivalent claim to determine their own affairs.
Churchill’s account of the Pashtun peoples encountered on the North-West Frontier was unapologetically hierarchical. Their ethics, he wrote, regarded ‘treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices’ and were ‘incomprehensible to a logical mind’. The ‘civilised European’ was no more capable of understanding them than the strange creatures revealed beneath a microscope. Elsewhere he reduced the collision between imperial technology and indigenous society to a memorable formula: ‘The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age.’
This was more than the casual racial prejudice of a young Victorian officer. It represented a way of organising the world. The European observed, classified and explained; the people being observed appeared as primitive, irrational and violent. In the sense later developed by Edward Said, Churchill was acting as an Orientalist: the Westerner whose supposedly superior knowledge enabled him to interpret an otherwise incomprehensible East.
The assumptions had practical consequences. Churchill enthusiastically described the destructive effects of the expanding ‘dum-dum’ bullet and defended the British practice of destroying villages as collective punishment. The idea that troops should determine which houses belonged to guilty and innocent people was, he thought, ‘sufficiently ridiculous’. Where individuals could not be punished, ‘their property must be destroyed. Their villages are made hostages for their good behaviour.’
Such methods were not peculiar to Churchill. They formed part of the British practice of imperial ‘pacification’, in which expeditionary forces used superior military technology to suppress resistance and, where necessary, destroy the civilian infrastructure sustaining it. But Churchill revelled in this world. It offered danger, movement and opportunities for individual action. And he carried these imperial sensibilities throughout his life: in 1943, his doctor, Lord Moran, remarked to his diary that when Churchill spoke of India and China, it reminded listeners that he remained of the Victorian age.
The significance of Malakand then, is that we can see remarkably early the combination that would recur throughout his career: confidence in force, racist contempt, a taste for dramatic action and an extraordinary confidence in his own judgement.
His escape from Boer captivity in South Africa in 1899 reinforced the persona. It made Churchill a celebrity and helped launch his political career. Here was the young aristocrat as man of action: soldier, war correspondent, adventurer and, increasingly, politician.
Unfortunately, Churchill took his Boy’s Own approach to life into public affairs.
As Home Secretary in 1911 he famously appeared at the Sidney Street siege, where police and troops confronted armed Latvian revolutionaries in London’s East End. The precise extent of his intervention has subsequently been debated, but the image of the Home Secretary standing close to an exchange of gunfire was perfectly characteristic.
Three years later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill rushed to Antwerp as German forces closed upon the Belgian city. For several extraordinary days in October 1914, a British Cabinet minister became closely involved in directing the defence and even offered to resign from the government if he could be given military command, a proposition that his Cabinet colleagues laughed at.
His was an exceptionally dangerous disposition in a politician, but in 1940 it became an extraordinary asset.
The man for 1940
The familiar account of May 1940 is one of the foundation stories of modern Britain. Public confidence in Neville Chamberlain’s government collapsed thanks to the British response to the German invasion of Norway the previous month, the rich irony being that Churchill himself was primarily responsible thanks to his bungling management of the Royal Navy.
With the parliament desperate to find a leader who could restore confidence in the war effort, the spotlight fell on Churchill, and the rest as they say is history.
The imperial adventurer had found the historical moment for which he seemed almost designed. Churchill possessed something his rivals conspicuously lacked. He understood the scale of the crisis and could translate it into language capable of mobilising a democratic society. His appetite for struggle, his confidence in Britain’s capacity to survive and even his tendency to dramatise events became political resources.
But the ‘great man’ account leaves something important out.
Churchill did not simply replace Chamberlain and rally Britain behind him, because at the moment of crisis in May 1940 Britain required a new political basis for conducting the war. After years of Conservative-led appeasement, only the entry of the Labour Party into a national coalition would give the British working-class belief in the cause. In practice then, it was the Labour Party agreeing to join the government – under any leader but Chamberlain – that was the first pre-condition to the reconstruction of British political leadership. Churchill was the personification of that reconstruction; the underlying class politics centred not on him, but on Labour.
That mattered because Britain was not simply mobilising armed forces. It was mobilising a society divided profoundly by class. Winning a total war required industrial workers to accept conscription, rationing, longer hours, restrictions on consumption and the direction of labour by the state. A Conservative government alone – particularly one associated with unemployment, the conflicts of the 1930s and appeasement – palpably struggled to command the necessary legitimacy.
Labour’s entry into government brought organised labour into the political management of the war. Clement Attlee became Churchill’s deputy; Ernest Bevin, drawn directly from the trade-union movement, became Minister of Labour and National Service.
Churchill was indispensable to the coalition.
But the coalition was also indispensable to Churchill.
This matters because it changes what we mean when we say that Churchill ‘saved Britain’. Leadership mattered enormously in 1940, but leadership did not operate independently of political institutions and social forces. Churchill provided language, energy and resolve. The coalition provided a political basis upon which those qualities could be converted into a national war effort.
The heroic leader and the democratic mobilisation were not alternatives. Britain needed both.
Who would restrain Churchill?
Surviving 1940 did not eliminate the other Churchill.
As the immediate danger of invasion receded, his extraordinary appetite for ideas and action repeatedly collided with the requirements of running a global war. Churchill bombarded his military chiefs with proposals, demanded investigations, challenged orthodoxies and searched continually for ways to seize the initiative.
But a willingness to challenge institutions is not the same thing as possessing consistently better judgement than them.
Churchill remained attracted to dramatic strategic possibilities, particularly around the Mediterranean. From his colonial experiences, he consistently underestimated the enormous logistical demands of modern armies, overestimated what determined action might accomplish and become impatient with professional objections.
This is why the diary of Alan Brooke is so important to understanding Churchill’s wartime leadership. He later concluded his most important contribution as head of the British Army was his success in blocking Churchill’s wildest schemes.
The British system thus worked partly because Churchill generated strategic energy and other people constrained it.
Churchill’s war—and Australia’s
For Australians, there is another dimension to the Churchill paradox.
Churchill’s conception of Britain remained inseparable from Empire. The Dominions possessed governments and increasingly asserted their national interests, but Churchill could still approach their armed forces as components of a wider imperial strategic system.
The Greek campaign of 1941 provides a particularly revealing example.
Britain’s decision to send troops to Greece against the expected German invasion was politically understandable but militarily fraught. British commanders in the Middle East were already fighting in North Africa, and the forces available for Greece included Australian and New Zealand troops.
The decision also demonstrated the unequal distribution of information within the imperial relationship. Churchill and the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, controlled much of the information upon which the Dominion governments depended when considering the deployment. Australia and New Zealand formally consented, but they did so without access to everything known in London and Cairo about the risks involved.
The result was another desperate evacuation, in which the ANZAC forces were lucky to largely, but not wholly, escape.
For Churchill, however, the strategic map remained imperial. British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian forces were resources that could be moved around that map in response to a global war.
Australia’s experience in early 1942 demonstrated the country now saw matters differently.
With Japan advancing through South-East Asia, Australian troops were returning from the Middle East. Churchill sought to divert elements of the returning force towards Burma, and subsequently India, without first securing the agreement of the Australian government.
Prime Minister John Curtin refused.
The dispute was about much more than the destination of a convoy. It exposed two different conceptions of political authority. Churchill continued to think of his entitlement to direct an empire fighting a global war. Curtin was responsible to an Australian electorate for the defence of Australia and regarded Australian forces as ultimately subject to Australian government control.
Both men could claim that the fate of the war was at stake. But only one still assumed that imperial governance gave London an overriding claim.
The paradox
None of this requires us to deny Churchill’s achievement in 1940.
Indeed, doing so would miss the point.
The imperialist, adventurer and political meddler was not a different Churchill from the leader who helped Britain survive its greatest twentieth-century crisis. His extraordinary confidence in his own judgement, appetite for risk, contempt for obstacles, delight in action and capacity to imagine possibilities invisible to more conventional politicians produced both.
Nor was Churchill alone responsible for Britain’s survival. The mythology of 1940 sometimes allows the man to take precedence over the society he led. Britain’s capacity to continue the war depended upon institutions, armed forces, industrial workers, trade unions and a political coalition extending far beyond Churchill’s own Tory constituency.
More than eighty years later, the temptation remains to choose between those two Churchills: saviour or imperialist, democrat or reactionary, brilliant leader or reckless adventurer.
The Churchill paradox is that Britain may have needed precisely the man it also needed to restrain.