The play’s the thing but blood is its trumpet

[resuscitated by Lynn C. Rees]

A book review of Max Hastings’ book Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945:

John F. Kennedy said that in 1940 Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it to battle. But that was the problem. Churchill saw war in rhetorical terms, as pageantry and drama, as though eloquence alone were enough.

At the beginning of the war Evelyn Waugh joined a new unit of the Royal Marines, for which Churchill, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, was responsible. As Waugh dryly put it in a letter, he was “now in a very fine force which Winston is raising in order to provide himself with material for his broadcasts.” Rhetorical was what these forces and their derring-­do often were.

What Churchill quite failed to grasp was the importance of sheer mass in modern war, as opposed to “The British Way in Warfare.” That was the title of a book published in November 1942 by Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart, the self-appointed, and sometimes self-important, military oracle, in which he returned to his pet theme: England’s greatness had formerly rested on indirect attack and limited aims, a policy tragically forgotten in 1914.

In a fascinating review that Hastings might have quoted, George Orwell summarized this “traditional strategy” favored by Hart, not to say by Churchill: “You attack your enemy chiefly by means of blockade, privateering and seaborne ‘commando’ raids. You avoid raising a mass army and leave the land fighting as far as possible to continental allies.” What few people seemed to have noticed, Orwell went on, was that for the past three years we had “waged the kind of war that Captain Liddell Hart advocated,” and yet neither he “nor anyone else would argue that this war has gone well for us.”

I once leafed through Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn at a local bookstore. I put it down in disgust: Atkinson’s introduction fawned over the World War II-era British Army. Even by our low national standards, glorification of the World War II-era British Army is a silly exercise in American self-loathing. The British Army started the war badly, fought the war badly, and ended the war badly. Its leaders occasionally rose to adequacy but were almost uniformly terrible. Two British generals, Harold Alexander and His Serene Highness Prince Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas “Chainsaw” von Battenberg Mountbatten were selected for theater command more for their agreeable temperament than their military talent. The one World War II-era British general of any stature among the Great Captains of History was frowned upon by Churchill and exiled to a military backwater.

While American military leaders insisted on a cross-channel invasion in 1942 and 1943 (which would have failed) and incompetent Soviet military leadership killed uncounted millions of Russian soldiers and civilians, they were right on the big picture: the war in Europe would not end until enough military force was brought to bear on the North European Plain to break the Wehrmacht and destroy the Nazi regime.

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