Writing in the mid-20s about the Great War, Winston Churchill wrote that the grotesque casualties of the Battle of the Somme and others might have been avoided " if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.” I'm just writing to say I like that line. General Douglas Haig, who would have been understood by even casual readers of that line on its first publication as among its targets, if not indeed the chief of its targets. is said to have been (understandably) furious over it. What is more interesting for me is the role that this conviction might have played in certain strategic arguments between Churchill and Roosevelt during the following war. Roosevelt wanted a US/UK front in northwestern Europe as soon as possible. Stalin understandably agreed -- a new front would at the least tie up German resources and take some pressure off the eastern front on which the R...
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May 10, 1940, was the day Winston Churchill formally replaced Neville Chamberlain at 10 Downing Street. The illustration here is of Chamberlain. It was not the end of a war. It was not even the beginning of the end. But it was the end of the beginning. https://www.onthisday.com/day/may/10
The website of BBC recently ran a list of the ten greatest continuing controversies about Winston Churchill. Personally, I was a bit surprised to find nothing about Bretton Woods there. Certainly Churchill's relationship to the Bretton Woods conference, of '44, which formally gave the US dollar the central place as the western world's currency, has been a matter of considerable controversy. I refer the reader doubtful on that point to THE BATTLE OF BRETTON WOODS, a recent offering of the Princeton University Press, which paints the conference itself as a dollar-versus-pound tug-of-war. Churchill either acceded to the lessened significance of the pound, or simply wasn't paying attention, and either fact is an important one. It is hard to believe that he wasn't paying attention. He had been closely associated with a gold standard earlier in his political career (a fact which also doesn't get into the BBC list), so it is possible he acceded to the supremac...
Four brief passages from the Manchester/Reid book. The italicized materials below are each taken from pp. 506-07. "It was over India and empire that Churchill and Roosevelt had their first serious political argument. Roosevelt presumed he could speak frankly to Churchill on most matters, including -- and mistakenly -- India. Churchill, out of politeness, kept Roosevelt abreast of Cripp's progress, or lack thereof." Stafford Cripps, in the spring of 1942 the most prominent member of the Labour Party in the War Cabinet, had gone to India to attempt to negotiate an understanding with the nationalist leaders, in particular Gandhi, by offering them semi-independent for India after the war if they would assist in the resistence to Japan in the meantime. It wasn't going well. But back to the book: "When the talks broke down, Roosevelt blamed Churchill, in the most frank terms. The two men had very different long-term objectives. Beyond the defeat of Hitler, Ch...
Late last year the publisher Little Brown brought out the third volume of a biography of Winston Churchill that has been in the works for decades, The Last Lion. The first volume, by William Manchester, The Last Lion: Visions of Glory , appeared in 1983. The second volume, subtitled Alone , came out five years later. Then Manchester put the final volume on the back burner and turned to another project, A World Lit Only By Fire , his informal meditation on medieval Europe, published in 1992. In 1998, Manchester suffered two strokes. He had, by this time, compiled extensive research materials for volume three, including interview transcripts, but had only made a start onthe actual composition. Over the following years, Manchester realized that his condition was not going to allow him to complete this project, and in 2003 he told his friend Paul Reid, a feature writer for Cox Newspapers, "I'd like you to finish the book." Manchester passed away the following yea...