Review by David Freeman

Ian Wood is a Lecturer in History at Napier University in Edinburgh and a tutor with the Open University. His book is aimed primarily at students, but the general reader will find this to be a solid, thoughtful and up-to date assessment of Churchill’s career. Regarding the production of yet another conventional biography as superfluous, Wood adopts a thematic approach. The brief monograph’s nine chapters analyze topics such as: Churchill the Warrior, Churchill and Appeasement, Churchill and the United States, and so on. These essays rely on much of the most recent (and best) scholarship in Churchill studies with all evidence duly documented. The results are first rate and go a long way towards confounding recent revisionist theories.



Wood addresses many of the tired old points that revisionists have hammered away at over the years, but gives these topics a refreshing twist because he takes the responsible approach of providing balance and perspective. Thus, on the book’s very first page Wood observes that it has often been said Churchill “derived a real excitement for war and preparation for it.” But the author immediately goes on to write that “it was a guilty excitement, as Churchill often made clear when he thought aloud about it, and he was never indifferent to war’s implacable human price.” To follow this up Wood produces an appropriate illustrating quote from Churchill’s very first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force.



Having dispensed with the persistent myth that Churchill was a lifelong jingoist, Wood goes on to trace the development of his subject’s views on military administration. One of the principle themes to emerge here and from the rest of the book is Churchill’s passionate commitment to parliamentary principles, including civilian control of the military. Thus, Wood argues, Churchill believed “Germany’s major errors in the [First World] war . . . were a result of blinkered military professionals overriding the will of politicians, and he came close to despair at the weakness of a Prime Minister over commanders in the field whom he could not dismiss.” Churchill absorbed these lessons and, as Wood phrases it, “would not flinch from” them later when against all advice he insisted on assuming the role of Minister of Defense in 1940 to go with his commission as Prime Minister (p. 7).



Wood’s forte, then, lies in seeing Churchill at all times in the context of his entire career. This approach serves to answer critics who charge that Churchill himself bore as much responsibility as anyone for Britain’s military unpreparedness during the Appeasement years. The allegation rests upon Churchill’s strong, and successful, support for economies in the nation’s finances during his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But, as Wood observes, Churchill “was simply carrying out, with the tenacity he brought to every task, a Treasury brief to bring all expenditure under control” (p. 10). By implication, had the Former Naval Person been back at the Admiralty during the late 1920s, he undoubtedly would have been the foremost proponent of naval rearmament.



Churchill’s zeal for the British constitution included lending the full weight of his formidable talents to supporting the policies of cabinets in which he served even when those policies did not include the judicious moderation he had often advised. Nowhere is this more clear than in the events surrounding the General Strike. “Any version of 1926,” Wood correctly argues, “based on the notion of Baldwin as the moderate and Churchill the uncompromising class warrior is clearly misleading” (p. 130). As readers of Martin Gilbert’s fifth volume in the official biography (The Prophet of Truth) are aware, Churchill consistently supported a much more lenient policy towards the striking miners than that adopted by the Cabinet. But the democratic process having taken its course, the principled Chancellor did not hesitate to rally around the government when crisis erupted.



Finally, Wood makes the crucial point to remember when assessing the life of Winston Churchill – a point that Time magazine lost sight of in selecting its so-called “Person of the Century.” The matter arises in Wood’s discussion of Churchill’s postwar premiership, when the restored Prime Minister demonstrated a “disinclination to lead Britain into Europe after 1951…deferring important decision on the modernization of industry and industrial relations.” All of this may have set Britain up for more painful adjustments later on. “Yet the very fact that a democratic Western Europe re-emerged in 1945 to forge new institutions and relationships to bring former enemies together,” Wood concludes, “owed everything to Churchill’s decision that in 1940, Britain should fight on against Hitler whatever the risks or the cost.” (p. 112).