Another
great entry in the Last Lion trilogy, this book confirmed for me that
William Manchester is a great author and I will need to find more of his books.
This book covers 1932 to 1940, essentially Churchill’s time in the political
wilderness, which corresponds pretty neatly with the rise of Hitler and the
beginning of World War Two through the invasion of France. It is pretty good
timing that just as France is defeated and England is at its most vulnerable,
the nation turns to Churchill, the only prominent politician of whom it can be
said had always seen Hitler for what he was and who never doubted that England
must defeat him.
The
writing in this book is spectacular and I think that Manchester’s skill in
imagery and metaphor is as good as it gets in a biographer. I’ll quote him a
few times, so you get the picture.
- “All who were close to him agree that [Churchill] was weakly sexed, even in youth, and in his sixties his volcano was virtually extinct. In Parliament a fellow MP whispered to him that his trousers were unfastened. ‘It makes no difference,’ Winston replied wryly. ‘The dead bird doesn’t leave the nest.’”
- “Here [Neville Chamberlain] made a cardinal error. Afterward he happily wrote his sister that the Astors’ son William, recently returned from a trip to Berlin, had the impression that ‘Hitler definitely liked me & thought he could do business with me.’ This was true in the sense that an armed robber thinks he can do business with a bank teller.”
- “The German generals, who had been sweating blood, could scarcely believe their good luck.”
- “It was 5:10 P.M. when the Speaker recognized Churchill, and as Winston rose the mood of the House resembled that of Spaniards when the bull lunges into the arena.”
This book explores Winston a lot as
a person rather than a politician since he held no government post in the
cabinet until 1939. He was just a backbencher “though a very important one.” To
relax, Winston painted, and professional painters were known to comment that
his works were “of real merit” and that he was skilled in painting. He painted
like he thought, focusing on one object above all others and using his
concentration to bring that object to the fore. Winston also dedicated
significant time in this period to laying bricks for his retirement home and
fixing up the mansion that he would later give to his son when he and his wife
Clementine moved into the smaller house. The mansion was Chartwell and Winston
loved it tremendously, adopting animals to populate its grounds and building
ponds for fish and swimming. He spent his free time painting, laying bricks,
and engaging in major works of construction to keep himself busy.
Churchill
bore a very different relationship to power than other politicians that I’ve
read about. He had very little political skill and in this sense differed a lot
from Lyndon Johnson. Churchill was really a man with an idea who in normal
circumstances would probably not have risen to the heights he did. He knew
nothing of bringing votes together in Parliament. He rose to power for the sole
reason that he was consistent and consistently right in his admonition of
Hitler. His best “political” moves were the manners in which he obtained facts
and information while out of power. Because he was so trusted, he was able to
get civil service employees to send him information that he wanted that he was
not really supposed to have. Because he was so prominent, people from outside
the government who had information about German armaments came to him because
they trusted him more than the appeasing Prime Ministers MacDonald, Baldwin,
and Chamberlain. Finally, he was able to get official government figures
because MacDonald authorized him almost a decade before the war and everybody
forgot that he had that access. Manchester writes, “Reading the transcriptions
of those parliamentary debates today, one can only imagine the ministers’
astonishment as Churchill rose to face them and reel off facts and figures that
seemed to have come from nowhere — but were always confirmed afterward. Had
Simon, say, or Hoare done his homework, they would have realized that Churchill
had access to documents stamped ‘Most Secret.’”
It is
astonishing how unready and unwilling Britain and France were to face the Nazi
threat in hindsight. The psychological phenomenon is fascinating. Having won
the last war, neither could bear to imagine another war, having seen a
generation of their best men slaughtered. During the German buildup, popular
opinion in Britain supported appeasement and the men who led the charge saw
themselves as the protectors of peace. By avoiding antagonizing Germany, they
thought that they did the world a service. They fundamentally did not
understand who Hitler was. Churchill could understand him better, I think,
because they were somewhat similar people. Both saw the world in terms of good
and evil with their respective nations as the great good. Both also saw
themselves as tremendously important and shapers of the world. It was easier
for Churchill to understand where Hitler was headed and why letting him have
the Rhineland or the Saarland or all of Czechoslovakia would not sate his
appetite but only increase his hunger. Churchill saw things others could not.
For example, when Britain decided to allow Germany to build up its fleet,
Churchill saw the threat this would pose. Although Britain only allowed a
buildup to a fraction of its own power, Germany had no overseas possessions.
While the entire English fleet, if together, would easily defeat Germany, that
could never happen since they had to protect possessions as disparate as the Falklands
and India. It was only with the seizure of Prague that British public opinion
started to turn against Hitler, and it would be longer among the Parliamentary
leaders of the appeasement movement. In France, politicians would beg their
generals to invade the weakly defended German border when Hitler invaded Poland
but were rebuffed.
When
Germany did invade, they were using tactics that were totally innovative. For
example, in Poland, Nazis who knew Polish simulated Polish news programs
telling Poles to flee down the very roads that the Polish army needed for their
maneuvers. They attached sirens to dive bombers to stoke maximum fear amongst
the populace. The French and British, on the other hand, were convinced that
air power would not play a major part in war and the French also limited their
tanks, not giving them radios so that they couldn’t coordinate attacks and
counterattacks. The French R-35 was better than any German model according to
Manchester, yet France sold 235 of the last 500 produced to other countries and
had only 90 on the front when the Germans struck. When Germany invaded Poland
in September 1939, Poland and France had 130 divisions to Germany’s 98 (of
which 36 were totally untrained, so really 62). There was no challenge at all
to the French and they could have probably defeated Nazi Germany right then and
there. The political situation in France was even worse than in Britain: their
chief general resigned just hours before the Nazis invaded and France was
without a government.
The book
made me think a lot about modern parallels with China. Will we see in our
lifetimes a repetition of these themes as China grows in power and Americans
try to keep the peace? How far will China go to assert its power? As I write
this, the Communist Party of China is committing atrocities in Xinjiang and
crushing the liberty of Hong Kong. For most Americans it is shocking how Chin
can even crush the criticisms of an NBA GM who tweeted about Hong Kong. I don’t
think that this is the conflict that will cause a war, but I do think that we
might be at the beginning of a cold war. I hope that we have a Churchill
somewhere who can guide us through it.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Churchill was a Zionist and opposed the Chamberlain government’s policy of restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine, which occurred nine weeks after Nazis stormed into Prague.
- This is not really a fact, but I think it’s interesting how FDR is to Churchill as Reagan is to Margaret Thatcher. The two most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20th century both had the support of an American counterpart.
- When he was reinstated as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939, Churchill carried around a pistol and a suicide pill in his pen.
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