The play’s the thing but blood is its trumpet

Churchill’s indirect approach fantasy was built on the proposition that penny packets of American Allied forces landed in small isolated pockets in Italy or the Balkans would somehow drain away significant amounts of German strength. This drainage would occur despite how indirectly approaching Germany from its “soft” Mediterranean underbelly involved directly and repeatedly banging the American’s Allies’ head against the southern face of the Alps. When Italy tried this same indirection during World War I, it worked so well that they went on to make ten sequels.

In contrast, Churchill vehemently opposed an Allied landing in Provence, the Mediterranean gateway to the only significant gap in the mountain ranges guarding southern Europe. He must have instinctively found its strategic rationality offensive. The Allied landing there in 1944, two months after the Normandy landings, was an outstanding victory (as Churchill, to his credit, gracefully admitted).

Churchill was a brilliant scribbler and weaver of narrative but a mediocre to utterly pathetic strategist. While he rightly recognized the core need for an energizing plot line in underscoring any successful war effort, this was not a unique insight or skill among Allied leaders: FDR and Stalin were also masters of story telling. Consider the opening to Stalin’s famous (in Russia) July 3rd, 1941 speech:

Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing  you, my friends!

This is not “never surrender” “finest hour” “owed by so many to so few” “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” inspirational to Western ears, but it was the first and last time Stalin’s rhetoric was personal. Starved for love from their Little Father for so long, Soviet subjects citizens responded to Stalin’s genocidal terror wooden brand of charisma with alacrity. The difference between Churchill and the other Big Two was that FDR and Stalin remembered that, while a strong strategic story is crucial in war, it is not sufficient unto itself. The Carl observes:

Essentially war is fighting, for fighting is the only effective  principle in the manifold activities generally designated as war.  Fighting, in turn, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the  medium of the latter. Naturally moral strength must not be excluded, for  psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements  involved in war.

And reiterates:

Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way  to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might  imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds,  it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business  that the mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst. The  maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use  of the intellect. If one side uses force without compunction,  undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains,  the first will gain the upper hand.

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