Winston Churchill: At War and Thinking of War Before 1939 edited by B.J.C. McKercher and Antoine Capet provides a collection of eight interesting essays by several of the leading scholars on Winston Churchill and his era. Prior to the onset of the Second World War, Churchill had been a soldier, statesman, military historian, and writer on military affairs. As is noted in the book’s introduction, “his military service and efforts in and out of the Cabinet in fighting and thinking about war prior to 1939 provides a telling prologue to whatever he achieved as a warlord during the Second World War.” Published as part of the Routledge Studies in Modern British History series, this essay collection is derived from a conference, “Winston Churchill (1874-1965) in Peace and War,” that was held in Paris in September 2015. The primary audience of the volume are scholarly readers.
The eight essays are “At War on the Nile: What Winston Churchill Learned from the River War” (James W. Muller), “A Dangerous, if not Malignant Design”: Winston Churchill and the German Naval Challenge before the First World War” (John H. Maurer), “By God, I will make them Fight!” Winston Churchill and Britain’s Decision for War in 1914” (John W. Young), “Churchill’s Downfall in 1915: The British Press and the Dardanelles Campaign” (Christopher M. Bell), “What Churchill and de Gaulle Learned from the Great War” (Will Morrissey), “The Limitations of the Politician-Historian: Winston Churchill, Rearmament, Appeasement, and the Origins of the Second World War” (B. J. C. McKercher), “Winston Churchill and the Golden Age of Journalism,” (Richard Toye) and “Winston Churchill, Islam and the Middle East” (Warren Dockter).
Among the essays is James Muller’s discussion of Churchill’s participation in the Sudan Campaign and his subsequent book The River War that concludes that the book “still offers a definitive account of the re-conquest of the Sudan and a thoughtful exploration of the problems of war, empire, race, and religion that Churchill first encountered in the late Victorian era – which are very much still our problems today.”
John Young in the chapter on Churchill’s role in the decision for war in 1914 remarks that Churchill was the cabinet’s “foremost exponent of British intervention.” As the crisis unfolded, Churchill readied the navy for war and pushed his cabinet colleagues, often acting without their approval relying, instead, on the support of Asquith. Young also considers Churchill’s decision during the July crisis to seize two dreadnoughts that had been built in British shipyards and were ready to be delivered to Turkey, a decision that was later claimed to have driven the Turks into the war on the side of Germany. Young concludes that it was “probably best” that the ships were seized. Had the dreadnoughts been delivered as scheduled to a power already in negotiations with Berlin and subsequently used against the Allied Powers, this reviewer would expect there would have been domestic and international repercussions, with Churchill, no doubt, criticized for failing to act to stop the delivery.
Churchill’s first volume of his Second World War memoirs, The Gathering Storm, is severely criticized in McKercher’s essay as it is found to be “woefully inadequate as an historical analysis in understanding how war came and demonstrates the limitations of a politician-historian.” McKercher considers The Gathering Storm an “egotistical chronicle” which ignores the complexities British leaders faced in “building effective strategy based on rearmament and doing so within confines established by electoral and public opinion concerned as much with domestic issues.” McKercher rather overstates his case at times, most especially with his claim that “the patrician Churchill lacked any understanding of post-1918 British electoral politics.” As Churchill ran for election eight times from 1918 to 1935 (winning five times), I would venture it is safe to say he had, at the very least, some understanding of electoral politics.
John Maurer provides a most interesting essay on Churchill and the German naval challenge. As First Lord of the Admiralty for the three years prior to the start of the First World War, Churchill was responsible for British “naval security” and played a leading role in directing British policy and strategy in the Anglo-German naval competition. Maurer observes that in seeking to keep ahead of Germany on the seas, Churchill had to walk a “political tightrope” between the proponents of British naval preparedness and those who opposed higher naval spending and thought Churchill was merely provoking Germany, with many of the latter found in Churchill’s own Liberal party and Asquith government. Meeting the German naval challenge required Churchill to employ his “skills in administration, strategic assessment, execution of policy, political maneuvering, and powers of expression” to build and maintain a domestic “political consensus.”
At the start of the First World War, Churchill’s standing with the British public and press was at a peak, but within weeks he was the target of a press campaign demanding he be forced out as First Lord of the Admiralty. In an excellent essay on Churchill’s downfall, Bell writes that by the end of 1914 the conservative newspapers were “committed to a depiction of Churchill as a loose cannon who was personally responsible for some of the worst setbacks that Britain had suffered in the opening months of the war,” while Churchill was “frustrated by his inability to lash back at his critics in the press.” The newspaper attacks intensified with the naval failure at the Dardanelles and Churchill was ousted in the political crisis in May 1915 that led to the forming of the coalition government. Bell writes that the press campaign was a “mixture of truths, half-truths, and outright fabrications,” with the consistent theme that Churchill “routinely ignored his naval advisors; he was a reckless amateur with fatally flawed judgement” and solely responsible for the navy’s defeats. There is, Bell concludes, “enough truth in these charges” that they were embraced at the time and a century later are “still going strong.”
Winston Churchill: At War and Thinking of War Before 1939 provides a collection of substantive and challenging essays that make many useful observations that will stimulate further historical discussion and scholarship.