Churchill and American Experts
LUKACS, JOHN A.
WRITERS and WRITING Churchill and U.S. Experts Winston Churchill and the Second Front, 1940-43. By Trumbull Higgins. Oxford. 218 pp. $6.00. Revieived by John A. Lukacs Author, "The Great Powers...
...They are, of course, usually all wrong...
...The issue is a very great one...
...Of course, Higgins would admit that the Churchillian inclinations have been honorable ones...
...In a way, so is Trumbull Higgins, even though his book is consistently, sharply and often exaggeratedly critical of Churchillian strategy...
...I do not say that Churchill was a demigod, and not even that he was a Good Giant but that, compared to him, Stettinius and Eisenhower and the rest were pygmies...
...Unfortunately, with Herren Professoren Teller and Conant and Dulles, the Great Eagle has now become the Atomic Platypus, big flat head, flat little eyes, flat feet, flat minds and all...
...These personal inclinations, according to Higgins, included peripheral warfare...
...Thus, fourteen years ago Time and Life (though not Stalin) attacked Churchill for putting down a Communist uprising in Greece because, in their opinion, here was a Churchillian imperialist trick all over again...
...Unlike his American psychoanalysts (and Higgins is not among the usual run), Churchill was a generous man...
...On the other hand, Higgins's main thesis is brilliantly supported with the help of fragments of evidence organized most intelligently...
...I have a tiny suspicion that Churchill may never have read Clausewitz and that he may not even know what "Erastianism" or "Arminianism" are supposed to be...
...This is the point beyond which Higgins spins his thesis to undue lengths: He speaks of Churchill's "Erastian," "Anglican," "Arminian'' strategy, and calls him "a master solidly based on Clausewitz...
...There was the American refusal to understand "British imperialism" in the Balkan invasion discussions or in the Greek Communist rebellion issue in 1944, twelve years before Suez...
...He would not have minded if George Washington's farewell image of the Decent Ugly Duckling had really become the Great Eagle of Western Christendom...
...for the great contrasts between Churchillian and American concepts ought to be examined in detail during the time when the divergences were deepest, from 1943 to 1946...
...The main thesis of Higgins's hook is summed up in the last paragraph, which says, among other things, that Churchill subordinated "a war not yet won to personal inclinations or to considerations of domestic policy...
...These reasonable convictions have, however, proven in part over-optimistic...
...If a great war leader of a democracy, at a time when the supreme danger of military defeat is already gone, wishes to reduce the number of dead and fight the war with political ends in mind, we ought to say: What's wrong with that...
...and now, when I understand that Stalin's Foundations of Leninism is always on Dulles's desk, I am sure that it is not on Khrushchev's...
...he is an American, hard rather than soft, and his book is not pompous at all...
...and his main domestic consideration was to have as few British battle casualties as possible...
...By 1944, for example, it was evident that Americans were not willing to side with Britain against the emerging power of Russia (just as today they are not willing to side with Britain on certain issues involving the emerging power of Germany...
...Trumbull Higgins is not a refugee scientist...
...It is, therefore, a pity that Higgins's book is wrong, too, though fortunately not all wrong...
...If Churchill was wrong, he was wrong not because of Higgins's points but because he tied British policy too closely to America...
...We are being solemnly treated to a spate of books usually written by refugee "political scientists" attempting to instruct Americans in How To Be Reasonably Machiavellian...
...Moreover (and this is an important point), Higgins in his book still talks about politics—which, under certain conditions first indicated by Aristotle, may be a reasonable and propitious endeavor...
...This is not simply attributable to Democrats or to Republicans, since this American suspicion in regard to Churchillian Britain (working almost always to the advantage of Moscow) has been entertained by Henry Wallace as well as by Henry Luce, by Joseph E. Davies as well as by Patrick Hurley, by Eleanor Roosevelt as well as by John Foster Dulles, by Alger Hiss as well as by Admiral King...
...Though they do not always agree with him, Harry Truman and George Kennan are among them...
...Revieived by John A. Lukacs Author, "The Great Powers and Eastern Europe" One of the most deplorable (and one of the most lucrative) of the cultural and political rackets that have sprung up in this country during the last ten years has been the production of projects in world strategy and books on military affairs written by professional intellectuals...
...After all, four-fifths of that presumably proto-typical "Puritan" war of the Union against the South was conducted, and bungled, with this supreme consideration of cutting down casualties in mind...
...These circumstances alone should entitle him to a hearing...
...Thus, fifteen years ago the Roosevelt circle dismissed Churchill's Balkan plans by saying, among themselves, that it was but a sort of psychological compensation on Churchill's part for his failure at the Dardanelles during the First World War...
...It is that, despite the flowery verbal admiration which Americans lavish on Winston Churchill (Time's Man of the Half-Century), they really do not understand him at all...
...And it may not be much of an exaggeration to say that most, if not all, of our troubles and dangers in the last fifteen years flowed from this peculiar misunderstanding of Churchill by Americans and of...
...Americans by Churchill...
...Thus, twelve years ago Dean Acheson snubbed Churchill after the famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, since the State Department felt it should not lend its prestige to a scheme involving America with Russia presumably to the advantage of Britain...
...Few are those Americans who understand Churchill...
...That they were good little pygmies, benevolent pygmies is beside the point...
...Yet Higgins, who contrasts Churchill's "Erastian" with the traditional North American "Puritan" concepts of war, does not quite make it clear that methods of warfare which are perhaps less "Erastian" and "Puritan" are more likely to be put into effect by great naval democracies...
...Thus, his almost unique argument is presented in a sharp, straightforward and honest brief...
...It is no longer women's clubs but foundation presidents, tycoon ambassadors and fat generals who listen in awe to the latest strategic theories spun out by flatfooted, flatulent and myopic scientists and intellectuals, most of whom have never had a rifle in their hands...
...and the mess in Europe and in Asia is largely due to the condition that after 1943 it was the Americans who had the main say in Globics and Churchill no longer had the main say in politics or in strategy...
...the point is that a pygmy, no matter how benevolent, has a fateful tendency to become all mixed up...
...But, then, I have always doubted that Stalin ever read Marx through, if at all...
...Globix...
...This may be so...
...Thus, five, four, three, two years ago McCarthy as well as the Lucepapers and Dulles openly attacked Churchill's calls for a new approach to Russia (during the confused period after Stalin's death) as if these were the appeasement advocacies of a man growing senile...
...hence the theorists and, after them, many people nowadays talk not politics but Globics (pron...
...And from being all mixed up to being all shook up is but one long step...
...In many issues, Roosevelt sided with Stalin rather than with Churchill...
...This may sound harsh, but it is true...
...The way this peculiar American inclination (it is, in reality, a curious mixture of suspicion and of a sense of inferiority) works is to attribute all kinds of motives to Churchill...
...Since 1939, Churchill staked almost everything on his conviction that Americans will support Britain against totalitarian powers, and that Americans would comprehend the inestimable importance of Anglo-American cooperation in this dangerous world...
...The trend nowadays is no longer to talk about something with which we are familiar but to postulate ideas about things with which we are not...
...Still, it is a pity that the book stops at 1943, in many respects not a propitious division date...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
