A CRITIC VIEWS A STATESMAN

...He was unable, therefore, to give as firm an assurance as was demanded, and the bargaining was prolonged accordingly...

...But Churchill, curiously enough, seems to have shrunk from publicizing the facts...

...Churchill, therefore, steadily refused to throw the whole of the British metropolitan air force into the Battle of France...

...At the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, for instance, when Churchill made his often-quoted fighting speech, it was rumored that what he actually said, when recording the speech for broadcasting, was: "We will fight on the beaches, we will fight in the streets...

...One may assume that this story is untrue, but at the time it was felt that it ought to be true...

...As he himself admits, Churchill had underestimated the effect of recent changes in the technique of war, but he reacted quickly when the storm broke in 1940...

...He also saw the importance of arming N the Palestine Jews and of fomenting rebellion in Abyssinia...

...he underrated public morale...

...We'll throw bottles at the b—s, it's about all we've got left"—but, of course the BBC's switch-censor pressed his thumb on the key at the right moment...

...He foresaw even in 1940 that the Germans would probably attack Russia, and he rightly calculated that Franco, whatever promises hetmight make, would not come into the war on the Axis side...

...CHURCHILL KNEW...

...THIS VOLUME...

...Unavoidably, as one reads, the thought moves to and fro in one's mind: "How freely is Churchill capable of speaking...

...Orwell include "The Lion and the Unicorn" and "Dickens...

...and this last judgment was not based simply on pugnacity but on a reasonable survey of the situation...

...Churchill is among other things a journalist, with a real if not very discriminating feeling for literature, and he also has a restless, enquiring mind, interested both in concrete facts and in the analysis of motives, sometimes including his own motives...

...It was a harsh decision, which naturally caused bitterness at the time and probably weakened Raynaud's position against the defeatists in the French government, but it was strategically correct...

...THE BOOK ENDS in the dark winter of 1940, when unexpected victories in the desert, with vast hauls of Italian prisoners, were offset by the bombing of London and the increased sinkings at sea...

...6.00...

...He would never, he says frankly, have quarrelled with Mussolini over such an issue as Abyssinia...

...He says revealingly that when he sent Sir Stafford Cripps as Ambassador to Moscow, he did not realize that Communists hate Socialists more than they hate Conservatives...

...The British people have generally rejected his policies, but they have always had a liking for him, as one can see from the tone of the stories about him thatjiave been told throughout most of his life...

...The book is heavily documented, with excerpts from speeches or despatches at each step, and though it leads to a great deal of reduplication, it makes it possible to compare What was said and thought at the time with what actually happened...

...His great achievement was to grasp even at the time of Dunkirk that , France was beaten and that Britain, in spite of appearances, was not beaten...

...This, of course, was a senseless condition . to impose...

...It was a fitting tribute from ordinary people to the tough and humorous old man whom they would not accept as a peacetime leader but whom in the moment of disaster they felt to be representative of themselves...

...OF COURSE, that the United States would enter the war sooner or later...

...No British Tory, indeed, seems to have grasped this simple fact until the advent of the Labor government in 1945: failure to do so was partly responsible for the mistaken British policy during the Spanish civil war...

...It could be taken as certain that Churchill would not hand over the fleet;*but, on the other hand, if the Germans succeeded in overrunning Britain, they would set up some kind of puppet government, for whose actions Churchill could not answer...

...Nevertheless, apart from the legal and constitutional difficulties, it was impossible for the ships to, be simply handed over without haggling...

...Mr Orwell also taught school, lived in Paris, and served on the staff of the British Broadcasting Company...

...Often, no doubt, these stories were apocryphal, and sometimes they were also unprintable, but the fact of their circulating is significant...

...Animal Farm.' A widely known author and critic...

...In general, Churchill's writings are more like those of a human being than of a public figure...

...and Others...

...The only way in which the Germans could win the war quickly was to conquer the British Isles, and to conquer the British Islets they had to get there, which meant having command of the sea over the Channel...

...Oiher books by Mr...

...Whether or not 1940 was anyone else's finest hour, it was certainly Churchill's...

...Nineteen Hundred and EightyFour...

...Roosevelt knew that it was in the American interest that Britain should have the destroyers, and Churchill knew that it was not to the disadvantage of Britain— rather the contrary—that the United States should have the bases...

...But it is fair to Winston Churchill to say that the political reminiscenses which he has published from time to time have always been a great deal above the average, in frankness as well as hn literary quality...

...It would have been dangerous, he says, to let it be kr.own how near Britain was to defeat—perhaps the only occasion throughout this period wher...

...The one quick solution would have been to secure a pledge from the whole British people, including the crews of the ships...

...THE SECOND IN THE SERIES, covers the period between the opening of the German attack on France and the end of 1940...

...Dall...

...His new book...

...and in a profession in which one is a baby at fifty and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future...

...A book like Ciano's diaries, for instance, would not have been published if its author had remained in good standing...

...When Italy entered the war, Churchill did not, of course, pull his punches, but the over-all situation would have been better if the British Tories could have grasped ten years erlier that Italian Fascism was not just another version of Conservatism but must of its nature be hostile to Britain...

...The twenty-five fighter squadrons held to be indispensable were kept in Britain, and the threatened invasion was beaten off...

...will be published in July...

...The Germans could still defeat Britain by the U-boat, or conceivably by bombing, but it would take several years, and in the meantime the war could be relied upon to spread...

...Churchill's attitude towards Mussolini, although it probably did not affect the course of events in 1940, was also based on a miscalculation...

...but at this stage he does not seem to have expected that an American army of millions of men would ultimately arrive in Europe...

...Where his judgment went astray, it was chiefly because of his undiscriminating hatred of "Bolshevism" and consequent tendency to ignore political distinctions...

...But at any rate, the tone of this and the preceding volume suggests that when the time comes, he will tell us more of the truth than has been revealed hitherto...

...However much one may disagree with him, however thankful one may be that he and his party did not win the 1945 election, one has to admire in him not only his courage but also a certain largeness and geniality which comes out even in formal memoirs of this type, much less personal than a book like My Early Life...

...Its main events, therefore, are the collapse of France, the German air attacks on Britain, the increasing involvement of the United States in the war, the stepping-up of the U-boat warfare, and the beginning of the long struggle in North Africa...

...With the election ahead of him, and with one eye on the Isolationists, Roosevelt had to give the appearance of driving a hard bargain He also had to demand an assurance that even if Britain lost the war, the British fleet would in no circumstances be handed over to the Germans...

...IT IS DIFFICULT for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows...

...For the main interest of these memoirs is bound to come later, when Churchill tells us (if he does decide to tell us) what really happened at Teheran and Yalta, and whether the policies there adopted were ones that he himself approved of, or whether they were forced upon him by Roosevelt...

...One of the most interesting chapters in Their Finest Hour deals with the exchange of American destroyers for bases in the British West Indies...

...GEORGE ORWELL, former literary editor of the London Tribune, ia famous for his nimble satire on Soviet Russia...

...The letters that passed between Churchill and Roosevelt form a sort of commentary on democratic politics...

...In the past he had admired Mussolini as a "bulwark against Bolshevism," and had belonged to the school that believed it possible to draw Italy out of the Axis by means of bribes...

...His present, book does, of course, contain passages which give the appearance of having escaped from an election address, but it also shows a considerable willingness to admit mistakes...

...Long before the year was over the danger had receded sufficiently for guns, tanks and men to be transferred from Britain to the Egyptian front...