Grand Churchill portrait

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 22

Grand Churchill portrait

Finest Hour. Winston S. Churchill 1939-41. By Martin Gilbert. Heinemann, 1983. 1274 pp. Illustrations, index. $39.95. Reviewed by Naylor Hillary

The enormous biography of Winston Churchill, begun by his son Randolph 17 years ago, is being continued by Martin Gilbert. This is volume six and it deals with only a little over two years of Churchill’s life, from September, 1939, to December, 1941. This was the most amazing two years in modern history, the most sensational two years since 1814-1815. For a year, from June, 1940, to June, 1941, Britain and her Imperial territories, including New Zealand, appeared to be on the brink of defeat by a Nazi Germany that had overrun much of Europe. By December, 1941, although years of war lay ahead, the Nazis’ attack on their former ally the Soviet Union, and the Japanese attack on the United States in the Philippines and Hawaii, had transformed a European war into a world war in which victory must eventually lie on the side of the biggest battalions, the anti-Nazi Powers. Churchill on the eve of war was a Parliamentary outcast, a rebel in his Conservative Party. In less than a year he was Prime Minister. By 1941 he was undisputed master of a war-making machine that touched and organised every aspect of life in Britain. Gilbert explores the crowded months through a painstaking — sometimes an hour-by-hour — analysis of Churchill’s doings, his private papers, the recollections of those who knew him. Inevitably, this is a history of the first two years of World War 11, but always from the perspective of Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, and after May, 1941, as Prime Minister. Always in the background lurks the vital question of Churchill’s relations with the American President, Franklin Roosevelt. On the help that Churchill could persuade or bully from the United States depended the survival of democracy in Europe. Churchill’s attention was taken up with immediate

matters of the war, of civil defence and supply in Britain, and with maintaining his position in the House of Commons. He still saw, correctly,’ that the single most important matter, in his world was the attitude of the United States Government and people towards Britain’s survival. Once America was in the war on Britain’s side, Churchill reflected he could go to bed and sleep “the sleep of the saved and the thankful.” Martin Gilbert takes more than 1200 pages to reach that point. Yet his account is so magnificent, the writing so lucid, that the distance seems short. Gilbert gives a context to familiar events from the history books. He takes time to notice detail. Churchill, called back to the Admiralty in 1939, sent for maps and was offered the same maps he had used, to fight the same enemy in the same oceans, as First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I more than 20 years before. Gilbert find the genesis of some of Churchill’s most stirring speeches in remarks tried out on companions and secretaries.

He explores the constant uncertainty in Britain, the search for an effective way to take the war to an overwhelming Continental enemy. The attack on the Germans in Norway, while Churchill was responsible for the Navy, was a disaster in which some of the blame is his. The attempt a year later, to meet the German advance in Greece, where the New Zealand Division came into action for the first time, was also a disaster in which some of the blame lies with Churchill; redeemed, however, by the political necessity of showing that Britain would help a small ally, even at high risk to her own survival. At the heart of the book lies the months of the Battle of Britain, and Gilbert’s account of Churchill’s part in organising and encouraging the defence is superb. Gilbert portrays the agonies of the fall of France, and the tragic action against the French fleet at Oran. He discusses the stern British refusal to contemplate any

compromise peace — on which issue Churchill received firm Labour backing, compared with the lukewarm stance of some of his Tory colleagues. Then come tense weeks of waiting for a German invasion, the constant flow of messages to supporters round the globe, and the daily battle in the skies. Slowly but surely, the darkest hours gave way to a dawn. The daytime battles over the south of England petered out. The night-time blitz on London and other cities was endured, and Bomber Command’s own campaign against Germany developed. The British and Empire troops held off the enemy in the Mediterranean, in spite of Mussolini’s intervention. Then, in June, 1941, Hitler turned from west to east with the fateful attack on the Soviet Union.

There is an heroic quality about “Finest Hour” which obviously could not be in the earlier volumes of the biography. That mood will also be missing from later volumes as the war effort in Britain, along with that of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, became overshadowed by that of the giant Allies, Russia and America. It is the actions of 1939-1941 that make Churchill one of the great figures of modern history. Gilbert presents the tale in a restrained and sympathetic way, often allowing Churchill to speak for himself. Grand flights of Churchillian eloquence are mixed with more intimate remarks from those who knew him at the time.

In January, 1941, Harry Hopkins, the personal representative of President Roosevelt, sent back from Britain a sketch of Churchill that could stand as a summary of Gilbert’s vast portrait: “Churchill is the Government in every sense of the word. He controls the grand strategy and often the details — labour trusts him, the army, navy, air force are behind him to a man. The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him.” In the finest hour, Churchill caught and sustained the mood of a nation, transcending political divisions. Gilbert has ..shown in detail that the trust was not misplaced.