Churchill: The All-Round Amateur
Carter, John
WINSTON CHURCHILL is an all-round amateur. He is an amateur statesman, an amateur strategist, an amateur journalist, and in England, where the professional is deeply distrusted, he has always...
...but he brands as folly Kitchener's much more astute proposal to effect a landing at Alexandretta, and has little to say of the Palestine, Saloniki or Mesopotamian "sideshows...
...The latter deserves quotation, as evidence of the rhetoric with which he addresses himself to events: Yet in the sphere of force, human records contain no manifestation like the eruption of the German volcano...
...The force of his narrative— and he can write well when he doesn't try to write superlatively—is too often broken by long quotations, usually from earlier Churchilliana...
...So, too, when he deals with our military effort, the Mr...
...As head of the Admiralty in the first period, he really influenced the diplomacy which led to the outbreak of the war...
...Churchill the journalist now deserves his turn...
...Dealing with Jellicoe, at the Battle of Jutland, he is likewise superior...
...Surely, Germans, for history it is enough...
...As present Chancellor of the Exchequer, as Minister of Munitions under Lloyd George, and as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, his words command respect...
...Churchill sets us squarely in our place...
...a mighty empire was battered into unrecognizable fragments...
...Actually, it was proposed in April, 1917, by the American navy and promptly rejected by the British Admiralty on May 13, 1917, as "quite impracticable...
...He has paid obvious heed to his opening and concluding paragraphs...
...The obvious course, he suggests, was to renew the attack on the Dardanelles in 1916...
...Not in Mr...
...Their dollars were useful to prevent the British from selling more of their stocks and bonds here, and Mr...
...Churchill is a British politician, and the British public doesn't like the way we have behaved toward) the debt, and history in British hands can bend far without breaking...
...Only once did we do well, in the drive on the Hindenburg line (under the proper British auspices) where an American corps led the attack as shock troops and had to be rescued by the Australians...
...The German, losses in men to those of the Allies were three to five and sometimes one to two...
...Mihiel salient was a neat job, but of course we shouldn't have been allowed to stage our projected drive for Metz and the German communications (it would have detracted from British operations farther north) ; our Argonne drive broke down through bad communications work...
...Actually, it is an anti-climax to his two previous volumes which dealt with the period of 1911-1914 and with the year 1915...
...in literature he has produced only good journalism...
...the St...
...It is here that Churchill the amateur statesman, or politician, comes to the fore...
...interspersed, unfortunately, with lengthy memoranda written by himself as Minister of Munitions...
...Witness how long the British army and navy held the Dardanelles against the Kemahsts in 1922...
...But as for military and naval aid—the convoy system, which defeated the submarine, was, he says, adopted by the British despite the fact that "United States naval authorities were opposed...
...he shows how in 1917 General Nivelle's "experiment" in the Champagne broke the combative value of the French army, producing mutinies in, sixteen French army corps...
...they will have to work hard to overthrow this identification of the British and the Churchill legends of the gifted amateur who always succeeds in beating the professionals at their own game...
...While speaking learnedly of our "fifty sovereign states," he observes that "what he [Wilson] did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915," and that "American historians will perhaps be somewhat lengthy in explaining to posterity exactly why the United States entered the great war on April 6, 1917, and why they did not enter at an earlier moment...
...In 1916, the long siege, which, in his view, separated the "first shock" of 1914 *The World CrisiSj igid-iQiS, by the Right Honorable Winston S. Churchill, C. H., M. P. Two Volumes...
...And has he any conception of the repugnance with which pubhc opinion here regarded the Czarist government...
...He shows how Britain threw away her armies on the Somme, and a year lateri did the same at Paschendale...
...Churchill views us as tardy colonials and treats us as such...
...in strategy his designs were either untimely or inept...
...He is an amateur statesman, an amateur strategist, an amateur journalist, and in England, where the professional is deeply distrusted, he has always commanded an enviable position in the world of statecraft, national defense and gentlemanly letters...
...Again, he speaks of the North Sea barrage as a British-American idea...
...As leader of the anti-American group in Liberal politics, the Right Honorable Mr...
...The German armies upheld her tottering confederates, intervened in every theatre with success, stood everywhere on conquered territory, and inflicted on their enemies more than twice the bloodshed they suffered themselves...
...The "lengthy explanation" is two words: "Japan" and "Russia...
...his earlier volumes, therefore, are real contributions to history...
...Small states were trampled down in the struggle...
...His statesmanship limits itself to glowing generalizations which do not bear analysis...
...The present volumes* conclude his account of the world war...
...By sheer force of his personal prestige and weight of words, his book—errant history and uneven journalism as it is—goes far to impose on posterity the view of events which it is now convenient for his personal interests to make current...
...Mellon over the war loans, speaks very lightly of our influence...
...Chateau-Thierry is not mentioned...
...He has set up a mark for more conscientious and less lively historians to shoot at...
...Churchill...
...or he should have used an obsolete signal and deployed on centre...
...Churchill the strategist dominates most of the first volume...
...The Russian revolution and the entry of the United States together receive less attention than many of his passing observations on his work as Minister of Munitions...
...at Soissons some American troops were "coolly handled...
...He effectively riddles the poHcy of attrition, showing by comparative casualty lists that the Germans inflicted a total of 7,644,000 losses on the Allies on the western front, while suffering only 4,846,000 casualties in the same area...
...in 1915 he had a sound strategic vision of the war as a whole, whatever the defects of the actual Dardanelles adventure...
...Actually, it is an uneven piece of work, in which the great events discussed serve as the frame for full-length appreciation of the Right Honorable Mr...
...and nearly twenty million men perished or shed their blood before the sword was wrested from that terrible hand...
...Now that our value to Great Britain is ended, he would dismiss us with a reprimand not to be late next time...
...His language varies from simple and effective prose to sprightly figures and startling metaphors...
...Baruch was friendly and helpful...
...He does the same for Falkenhayn, Ludendorff, et al...
...from the "final convulsion" of 1918, was at its height...
...He pays greater heed and gives as much space to these memoranda as he does to all the campaigns in Italy, the Balkans, Roumania, Russia, Palestine, and Mesopotamia combined...
...Overwhelming populations, unlimited resources, measureless sacrifice, the sea blockade, could not prevail for fifty months...
...In England this work has been hailed as a brilliant achievement, comparable to Macaulay...
...To return to the Americans, did they materially affect the conduct of the war...
...at all events, he should have intercepted Sheer at the Horn Reef on the day after the battle...
...in the second volume he defended his prosecution of the Dardanelles Campaign...
...For example, when he speaks of the U-boat war as "a game of blind man's buff in an unlimited space of three dimensions" and says that "the battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener's army," he is worth attention, but he is also capable of speaking of "the pistols which an hour before had drunk [sic] this loyal man's [Sir Henry Wilson] blood...
...But the very fact that he is an amateur prevents him from achieving real distinction in the fields of activity he honors with his interest...
...Churchill's account of the naval action is graphic and interesting but is marred by his air of arm-chair criticisms of men who were fighting in sea-haze and the "fog of war" at a time when it was the German navy against the British empire, as Jellicoe realized...
...Similarly, the account of the 1918 campaign is a fine narrative...
...Churchill forgotten the Twen ty-One Demands...
...As for the general cause of the Allies, if it was good in 1917 was it not equally good in 1914...
...In short, only his own "eastern" scheme was correct...
...To be sure, "the swift and ceaseless inflow of the Americans turned the balance of manpower heavily in the favor of the Allies," but who is responsible for having won the war...
...To break their strength and science and curb their fury, it was necessary to bring all the greatest nations of mankind into the field against them...
...in officers they were as one to three or four...
...Here is a mild discrepancy in fact...
...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Churchill mobilized the fleet in 1914...
...The last two volumes, now under review, are, however, rather rhetorical commentaries on the order of "What I did in the world war...
...There has been, it seems, a regrettable and foolish idea current that the intervention of the United States was decisive and that the Americans actually contributed to the final victory...
...Jellicoe lost three big chances at Jutland...
...He justifies this course by comparing it to Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, which was fiction masquerading as fact...
...The World Crisis, 1916-1918, occasionally falls into the same category...
...Jellicoe should have deployed to starboard and forced a decisive battle...
...Churchill's strategic infallibility, despite his Britannicocentric view of statecraft and his tenderness for ipslssima verba, The World Crisis, 1916-1918, stands as a monument to the energy of one of the most vital figures in English public life...
...Captain T. G. Frothingham's Naval History of the World War holds otherwise, stating that "The United States Navy Department was in favor of this system, and Admiral Sims threw all his influence for the convoys...
...With a gentle and scarifying irony he proceeds to state exactly how wrong and fallible were Joffre, French, Haig, Robertson, Nivelle, Petain and the other western fronters...
...Has Mr...
...Yet in spite of all Mr...
...In a word, Mr...
...Churchill's pages...
...In the words of Asquith, addressing the House of Commons, "Look at the map...
...For four years Germany fought and defied the five continents of the world by land and sea and air...
...Churchill who now debates at long range with Mr...
...Germany lost the war at sea...
...10.00...
...His book has been hailed in London as of "epic quality," "a masterpiece of English prose," "more fascinating than a novel and more provocative than a problem play...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 2
