Winston Churchill's War Leadership by Sir Martin Gilbert Read Free Book Online

leadership more humane and more sensitive. In one of his early letters to his wife, written within a year of their marriage in 1908, he wrote: “Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.” During the First World War he had sought to devise policies that would minimize suffering on the battlefield. He had planned the Dardanelles campaign as a means to end the terrible stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front and to bring the war to a speedier conclusion. He had opposed what he described as Britain’s “futile offensives” on the Western Front in 1917, which had culminated in the bloody slaughter at Passchendaele.
    During the Second World War Churchill was equally concerned about the human cost of the conflict, and not only to the Allies. At Chequers, after watching a short Royal Air Force film of the bombing of a German city, he commented to those present, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” But he had no doubt that the war had to be fought; that the struggle was between the forces of democracy and human decency on the one hand and tyranny and dictatorship on the other.
    No single aspect of Churchill’s war leadership was more intricate and more difficult than Britain’s relationship with the United States. The burden of this association fell on his shoulders. When Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, President Roosevelt had opened up a secret correspondence with him and had shown a genuine concern for the fate of Britain, but Churchill knew that American neutrality—enshrined in the formal legislation of successive Neutrality Acts—and the isolationist pressures that had beset Roosevelt since his first presidential electoral victory in 1933 were barriers to aid from the United States on the scale required.
    In the disastrous summer of 1940, with the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk (accompanied by a massive loss of equipment) and with the intensification of German bombing of factories and airfields throughout Britain, Churchill and those in the inner circle of government knew the precise details of Britain’s weakness on land, sea and air. Despite every effort being made to increase war production, Churchill knew that it was only through a massive contribution by the United States to every facet of Britain’s war-making arsenal that Britain could remain effectively at war. From the first to the last days of his premiership, the link to the United States was central to Churchill’s war policy. He spent more time and energy in seeking to obtain help from the United States than in any other endeavour. In the First World War, as Minister of Munitions, he had seen at first hand how decisive the arrival of American troops on the Western Front had been. From July 1917 to November 1918 he had worked in tandem with his American opposite number, Bernard Baruch, to secure the raw materials needed to prosecute the war to victory. In the interwar years he had written articles in the American press and broadcast to the United States across the Atlantic, urging Americans to realize that the conflict in Europe between democracy and dictatorship was also their conflict. While he reluctantly accepted that the United States would remain neutral in 1940, he also understood that he had the power to encourage Roosevelt to give Britain the military, naval and air supplies without which the future was bleak.
    The British public knew almost nothing of this aspect of Churchill’s war leadership. His telegrams to Roosevelt, some 1,300 in all, dealing with every aspect of war strategy and planning, were of the utmost secrecy. Many of the decisions he and Roosevelt reached were equally secret. Without them, Britain’s danger would have been far greater. Every aspect of Britain’s war-making capacity was affected and