Winston S. Churchill: Road to Victory 19414945
Gilbert, Martin
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL: ROAD TO VICTORY 1941-1945 Martin Gilbert/Houghton Mifflin/$40.00 Spencer Warren S urely the longest biography ever written, Martin Gilbert's magnificent life of Winston...
...After America's entry into the war, the American chiefs of staff, led by General Marshall, proposed an invasion of France for September 1942...
...His Polish policy was right in the fundamentals, but he showed too much readiness to pressure the Polish government in London on Russia's behalf, and also failed to get a quid pro quo for his efforts...
...He again argued that Allied forces had to be kept engaged somewhere, rather than sit idle till the next spring and let the Germans catch their breath (and probably reinforce France...
...Churchill urged instead that the Italian campaign be pressed to its conclusion and that a force then be sent through to Yugoslavia, cutting off German forces in the Balkans, and marching on Vienna...
...The Allies agreed the next objective would be clearance of the Mediterranean for shipping and, to facilitate this, a landing in Sicily...
...But Churchill's influence with Roosevelt and the force 'of the British chiefs' arguments that the enemy should be continuously engaged (an invasion of France was not possible until later in the year) carried the day...
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...hurchill's record is more mixed on the second major issue, relations with Soviet Russia...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987...
...In this he was wrong and the Americans right...
...there were even some indications that it would make a separate peace...
...Hitler was convinced that Normandy was a diversion from the main landing, which he thought would be across the Pas de Calais...
...Look around you...
...And he could not diverge from Roosevelt, who assured Churchill he "could personally handle Stalin...
...In retrospect, after forty years' experience with Soviet duplicity, we can say that Churchill (and, much more, Roosevelt) was at times too accommodating towards Stalin...
...As the authorized biographer, Gilbert sees his role as chronicler rather than interpreter...
...Along with Roosevelt's unhelpful attitude when he wanted to take a tougher line, this may have emboldened Stalin to be more aggressive in asserting control over eastern Europe...
...At their frequent conferences in 1942 and 1943, Churchill and his service chiefs persuaded their American colleagues of the advantages of campaigns first in French North Africa and then in Sicily and the Italian mainland...
...Both the Americans and the British saw northwest Europe as the decisive Spencer Warren is vice president of the Washington International Studies Center and served in the Reagan Administration as a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff theater of operations and also felt the keen imperative of relieving pressure on Russia, where the Germans, a year before Stalingrad, still had the upper hand...
...The reader who has time for only- one volume ought to turn to the preceding one, Finest Hour, 1939-1941, when Britain stood at the abyss and Churchill's courage, nobility, and eloquence were her salvation...
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...But on the whole this criticism misses the point...
...He agreed to let Russia keep the area of Poland it had annexed in the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939...
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...Northwest Europe was indeed the place to make the massive, decisive blow...
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...The Mediterranean strategy was crucial to the success of Overlord...
...Until Overlord, Russia carried the main burden of the war...
...Finally, in Washington in May 1943, they agreed an invasion of France was not possible that year (ironically, in part because the Americans were sending too many landing craft to the Pacific despite the Germany-first strategy...
...There was no "soft underbelly" of Europe and Italy was not the road to Germany...
...That the reader can be engrossed by thousands of pages of detail about one person is itself fitting testament to Churchill's greatness and largeness of spirit...
...the British were already engaged against the Germans in Egypt and Libya, and Algeria and Morocco were occupied only by the forces of Vichy France...
...Free Secret of Heart Ailments I am a new man...
...But in the end there is probably little Churchill could have done given the military developments that allowed the Red Army to sweep into the heart of Europe...
...Following heavy fighting on Iwo Jima and in the midst of fanatical opposition on Okinawa, the Americans had to withdraw their armies from Europe for the expected invasion of Japan...
...He had no choice...
...Meantime, they reasoned, forces couldbe built up in Britain for a cross-Channel invasion...
...The landings were made in Algeria and Morocco in November 1942, but American timidity prevented the British landing in This allowed the Germans to counter with powerful forces, delaying conclusion of the campaign for many months, until May 1943...
...Some issues, especially Churchill's dealings with Stalin, need interpretation...
...Stalin was pressing, almost pleading, for a landing in France...
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...As the volumes are now running well over 1000 pages each, analysis can only come at the expense of the extraordinarily rich detail which is the hallmark of the work...
...This might have saved some of eastern Europe (but not Poland) from the Russians...
...Alps barred the way...
...In the weeks before Roosevelt's death in April 1945, as Russian repression in Poland made clear Stalin's bad faith at Yalta, Churchill pushed for a confrontation...
...The fear haunted him throughout the war (and led him to send British troops to Greece late in 1944 to prevent a Communist takeover...
...Deeply troubled also about the hazards of Overlord, he fought against withdrawals of troops for that operation and came to see Italy as the main theater...
...Much has been written about Churchill's opposition to Operation Anvil, the invasion of southern France in August 1944 as an ancillary to Overlord, which required further withdrawals from Italy...
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...Moreover, Churchill knew that with the collapse of France and the coming destruction of Germany, no power would stand with Britain against Russia in the future except the unpredictable United States...
...Or that man-made drugs somehow heal better than Mother Nature's substances...
...President Roosevelt agreed, seeing this as the best way to get Americans into combat in the European theater in 1942, and thus solidify his Germany-first strategy...
...Operation Overlord, as the cross-Channel invasion became known, was set for May 1, 1944...
...While Churchill's realism placed limits on how far he would go to placate Russia, these factors, along with his own hopes for a peaceful world, led him to conciliate Stalin...
...At the end of the war he strongly urged President Truman that Allied troops not be withdrawn back across the Elbe to the zonal boundaries which had been agreed for the postwar division of Germany...
...This opportunity was lost in part through Eisenhower's indecision and inability to overcome the problems inherent to coalition warfare...
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...During the stalemate in Tunisia, the Anglo-American dispute over the second front came to a head at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943...
...But this was not possible...
...Of the countless strategic and political issues confronted by Churchill and recounted here by Gilbert, the most important are the timing of the opening of the second front in France and Anglo-American dealings with the Soviet Union...
...WINSTON S. CHURCHILL: ROAD TO VICTORY 1941-1945 Martin Gilbert/Houghton Mifflin/$40.00 Spencer Warren S urely the longest biography ever written, Martin Gilbert's magnificent life of Winston Churchill reaches its seventh volume in Road to Victory, which takes us from America's entry into the war in December 1941 to Germany's surrender in May 1945...
...Marshall advocated closing down Mediterranean operations after Tunisia in favor of an invasion of France as soon as possible...
...In October 1942 he wrote, "It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of . . . Europe...
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...This ambivalence can be seen in Churchill's policy on the main issue dividing the Big Three, the future of Poland...
...In addition, from 1942 to 1944 the Allied air forces had crushed the Luftwaffe and had also damaged the French rail network, limiting sharply the Germans' ability to reinforce Normandy...
...At times he even seemed influenced by Stalin's charm...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 47 But it was Churchill's caution and realism that checked the Americans' impetuousness and brought about the conditions for the success of the American strategy, which at one time had also been his and which in the end he supported with all his usual enthusiasm and vigor...
...Yet he was under a number of constraints...
...But Churchill and his chiefs of staff (led by General Sir Alan Brooke), who, unlike the Americans, had had first-hand experience of German might, had a far more realistic appreciation of the difficulties of a cross-Channel invasion...
...More important for the future of Europe were the conduct of the campaign in France and the generalship of Dwight Eisenhower and his chief lieutenants...
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...Had these been available for the battle in Normandy, the invasion might have failed...
...As the original (and still most eloquent) anti-Communist— he was the leading proponent of Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in 1918—Churchill entered into dealings with Stalin with a healthy skepticism...
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...The Germans' collapse at the end of the battle in Normandy in July-August 1944 gave the Western Allies the opportunity to march into Germany and quite possibly end the war in 1944...
...They would also have saved perhaps hundreds of thousands of casualties...
...He also stressed the advantages of knocking Italy out of the war...
...Gilbert accepts this analysis, but he also produces evidence that the British Joint Planning Staff and General Brooke had grave doubts about the practicability of the operation, which would have involved a winter campaign in the Alps...
...In those two years of war the German reserve had been badly depleted...
...Yes, the heart attack death rate is on the increase...
...the Appenines made rapid advance difficult and, beyond them, the...
...The atmosphere at the Teheran and Yalta conferences (two good arguments against summits) was too friendly...
...Further, the added time gave Allied, mainly British, deceptionschemes (Operation Bodyguard) time to work so effectively as to play a key role in Hitler's holding back Panzer divisions from the landing beaches...
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...Gilbert is letting Churchill tell his own long, immensely complex, fascinating story...
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...Gilbert has been much criticized for heavily emphasizing fact over analysis...
...ollowing the liberation of Sicily in the summer of 1943, Churchill succeeded in persuading the Americans to continue on to the Italian mainland...
...In June 1944, the Germans had twenty-eight divisions in Italy...
...One more volume is to come...
...two-thirds of allied losses in the French and German campaigns came after September...
...Yet he then fought hard for Poland's independence and was prepared to sunder the alliance over the issue once Germany was defeated...
...It is up to others to analyze and judge...
...Nor would American and British public opinion, which had been conditioned by strongly pro-Russianpropaganda, have understood or countenanced a break right after the joyous victory in Europe...
...That surgery is better than natural healing...
...I didn't...
...Russian forces could have ended the war well to the east of Germany...
...He has artfully spun Churchill's government and private papers, as well as memoirs and diaries of Churchill's colleagues and staff, into a compelling narrative of 1351 pages, charting Churchill's course, often day by day, through the momentous decisions of the war...
...FDR was also eager to enlist Russia in the war with Japan...
...As the Italian campaign proceeded, and Mussolini was overthrown, Churchill's fertile imagination was fired by the possibility of a rapid advance up the peninsula, followed by a strike into southern France or eastern Europe...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
