Finest Hour: Winston Churchill 1939-1941

...There is, of course, a happy ending...

...In politics, nothing fails like success...

...They often mask their fear in self-righteousness, and affect a superiority to mere grubby partisans who cannot see beyond their limited point of view...

...Twenty-five years later, it was not clear that the historian's distinctions could be so readily drawn...

...Churchill faced a situation not altogether dissimilar to our own: A democratic way of life was challenged by a form of totalitarianism both 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 brutal and insidious, and the instinct of many people was to deny the reality of the problem...

...Once war had begun, Churchill faced this problem in the attitude toward Hitler adopted by the neutrals: Small nations [he declared] must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedom...

...Out of the inarticulacy of the many possible and conflicting emotions the British were then experiencing, Churchill was able to elicit heroic passions to serve the policy he thought necessary...

...Except for the saga of the Hurricanes and Spitfires in the Battle of Britain, the phony war is a depressing story of inadequate equipment and men sent into battle without proper preparation...

...The response of the Soviet leadership to this economic problem is doubly interesting in that the economic downturn coincides with two back-to-back successions within the Soviet leadership...

...The neutrals, on the other hand, followed an understandable instinct to lie low and pretend they weren't there...

...Churchill's irritation on this score comes out most clearly when he introduced the naval estimates to Parliament in February 1940...

...After three decades of postwar expansion, the growth rate of Soviet GNP started dropping dramatically in the mid to late seventies as the decline of labor force migration from the countryside to urban Francis Fukuyama is a member o f the Political Science Department of the Rand Corporation...

...Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide...

...There were many British politicians of a pragmatic disposition who could see much smarter ways of navigating the ship of state than heading straight for what looked like the reefs of military defeat...

...I t is always tempting, and it sometimes illuminates a book, to read it through the lens of our own times...

...He describes a speech in 1958 by American historian Henry Steele Commager, in which he spoke of the differing qualities o f Jewish and Arab nationalism: While Jewish nationalism was "benign" Each of the wartime allies has a different epitome of the Second World War...

...It now looks inevitable that they should have signed up for the legend, but like most retrospections, this is profoundly mistaken...

...Many of them soon did find out, in spite of the belligerence of the British and the French...

...The letter of the law must not in supreme emergencies obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement...

...legend had not been a living presence guiding them...

...and they were on this point dead right...

...But neutrals are the pharisees of the modern world...

...Further, none of them had the slightest confidence in the military capacity of the British and the French...

...And Harold Nicolson replied to his wife a few days later with the remark: I feel so much in the spirit of Winston's great speech that I could face a world of enemies...

...I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar...

...Bloomington, Indiana ascendancy over the British mind can be judged by the effect it had even upon somewhat ineffable aesthetes like the Nicolsons...

...Gilbert does not evade the fact that Churchill was regarded by many of his fellow politicians as unsound...

...For the Russians, it is the grim attrition on the Eastern Front...

...Throughout this period, Churchill's faith was pinned on the United States, the greatest neutral of them all, and in the end the Japanese solved his problem for him...

...for the Americans, Pearl Harbor and the Normandy invasions...

...Such things lie beyond the scope of a biography...

...The allies of 1939 could hardly have protected them from an angry pussy cat, much less a ferocious tiger like Nazi Germany...

...The forces sent to Norway, for example, lacked even adequate maps of the terrain on which they would have to fight...

...In volume VI of the monumental biography of Churchill (which Randolph Churchill began) Martin Gilbert deals with this epic period...

...We usually think of legends as stories constructed long after the events that gave them birth, but this is one case where the events could not have happened the way they did if the Kenneth Minogue is Reader & Political Science at the London School of Economics and author o f The Liberal Mind...

...In the aftermath of Dunkirk, Churchill delivered in the Commons the famous speech declaring that Britain would fight on the beaches, and never surrender...

...Churchill was among the earliest to decide that the Nazi regime was an evil which would have to be fought and defeated, and when he became prime minister in May 1940 (he had previously been First Lord of the Admiralty) he was able to articulate this vision with such eloquence that it shaped the energies of the people he led...

...Churchill's irritation with the neutrals is one of the persistent themes of this early period of the war...

...From this point of view, the story of Churchill's life in this period was a cliffhanger: Will the Americans come in...

...During the entire period covered by this volume of Gilbert's biography, the energies of the British were almost all devoted to building up the apparatus of trained men and material which would allow them actually to begin to fight a modern war...

...For the British, it's Dunkirk, and a lone island standing against the unleashed forces of barbarism_9 And even to state the legend in that way is to invoke Winston Churchill, the legend's creator...

...He described as "one of the most extraordinary things I have ever known" the way in which German illegalities, atrocities, and brutalities "are coming to be accepted as if they were part of the ordinary day to day conditions of war...

...Even before AnTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 35...

...And he went on: Why, Sir, the neutral Press makes more fuss when I make a speech telling them what is their duty than they have done when hundreds of their ships have been sunk and many thousands of their sailors have been drowned or murdered, for that is the right word, on the open sea...

...In the twentieth century, the success of the Western world has been enormous, but it is precisely the habits bred by success which prove in the long run the most dangerous...

...His There i s opportunity In America...

...We follow Churchill day by day, and at times hour by hour, through the dangerous times...

...It is easy to read large parts of Finest Hour as a moral fable for our times, no less than a moral legend of Churchill's...

...These were the words of an inspired director who assigns roles to a cast, and the cast responded with enthusiasm...

...From one point of view, Churchill's irritation was merely a lack of imagination...

...f o r t u n a t e l y , Churchill could be talked out of them when necessary...

...To talk of final victory, as Churchill insisted upon doing through the most massive disasters, was to fly in the face of common sense...

...There were, he remarked in an early broadcast, still thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings who sometimes ask us: "What is it that Britain and France are fighting for...

...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...

...Since this slowdown is structural, it is evident that Moscow cannot maintain its 3-4 percent annual real growth in defense spending of the last twenty years without cutting back sharply in other areas...

...Apparently, according to the present doctrine of the neutral States, strongly endorsed by the German Government, Germany is to gain one set of advantages by breaking all the rules and committing foul outrages upon the seas, and then go on and gain another set of advantages through insisting whenever it suits her, upon the strictest interpretation of the International Code she has torn to pieces...

...and devoted to peace, Commager declared, the nationalism' of the surrounding lands was committed to "chauvinism, militarism, and territorial and cultural imperialism...

...and it was only luck, and the Channel, which gave them the opportunity to do so...

...It was, he later reflected, the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion's heart...

...areas brought an end to easy productivity gains...

...We leave Churchill signaling to Eden: "The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give certain victory...

...Seeing the conflict in moral terms, in which the British stood for goodness, legality, and the rights of small nations, he found it difficult to understand why he could not count upon their wholehearted support...

...Some of these ideas were dotty, some inspired...

...The French were frozen in the attitudes of 1918, while a long decade of pacifism had sapped British morale and left her armed forces largely equipped with weapons that belonged in a museum...

...No doubt this was in part the mistrust of genius by the mediocre, but it also reflected the fact that Churchill was prone to entertain brilliant but unworkable ideas...

...To this I answer: " I f we left off fighting you would soon find out...

...And the legend is so much a part of the reality, that it would be wrong to expect Gilbert to treat it critically...

...It is not at all odd that His Majesty's Government are getting rather tired of it...

...12.50 paper Francis Fukuyama The Soviet Union has been receiving special attention in recent years, and with good reason...

...In more than 1200 pages, Gilbert is able to open up the legend by an enormous expansion of its scale...

...The British celebrated their victory, and succumbed to complacency...

...In a remarkable feat of political rhetoric, Churchill's mind and the public life of Britain fused together in an act of psychic mobilization...

...AFTER BREZHNEV: SOURCES OF SOVIET CONDUCT IN THE 1980s Edited by Robert F. Byrnes/Indiana University Press $25.00...

...I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words' sake...

...It is easy to imagine that the national mood might have veered toward skepticism and defeatism, as it did in France, especially given the fact that Hitler's terms of accommodation were likely to be soft...

...He ended by saying: _9 . . and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the world_9 Vita Sackville West wrote to her husband that, even repeated by the announcer on the radio, it sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine...

...or alternatively to open up the wider strategic issues...

...I am getting rather tired of it myself...

...We learn much of the child's delight in clever toys: Projects to drop firebombs on the Black Forest or float mines down the Rhine from Strasbourg are understandable responses to the frustrations of the phony war, when all initiative rested with the Germans...

...They were terrified of doing anything to attract the attention of this ghastly wild beast on the prowl...

...How unfortunate that Grose mars a book 1 would otherwise heartily recommend by such uncritical acceptance of a certain new orthodoxy regarding Israel...

...Yes--but...

...Twenty years after emerging victorious from the greatest war in history, the British and French had very largely allowed their military capacities to fall into disrepair...

...Inevitably, much of it leaps from one celebrated speech to the next...

...It would not be right or rational that the Aggressor Power should gain one set of advantages by tearing up all laws, and another set by sheltering behind the innate respect for law of their opponents...

...It is quintessentially what is meant by all the cliches about the quality of leadership...

...I t is thus evident that, despite all the talk of the forces that determine events, this was a case where the man made the mood, and the mood gave authority to the man...

...His title is taken from one of the most famous: Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years men will still say, "This was their finest hour...