October 18, 2008

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, Volume VI, FINEST HOUR
by Martin Gilbert
(London, Heinemann; Boston: Houghton-Mifflin; Toronto: Stoddard, 1983)

Reviewed by Simon Schama in The New Republic
Published in Finest Hour 42, Winter 1984 with permission

    There are two heroes in this story: Winston Churchill and Martin Gilbert. The Promethean career of the one has inspired the Herculean labors of the other. In fact, in comparison with Gilbert’s epic toil, Hercules got off lightly.When Gilbert took over the biography, following Randolph Churchill’s death in 1968, the series was a mere two volumes and 1400 pages long. It had reached 1914. Since then Gilbert has logged in four more volumes, between them 9000 pages, not to mention eight Companion Volumes of documents, 10,000 pages more–plus a TV series, books to go with the TV series, and so on. This prodigious output – and Gilbert has written amply on contemporary and Jewish history as well – is likely to send most historians, more at ease with the judicious footnote or the learned article, running for their smelling salts.

    But Martin Gilbert is not like most historians. He happily abandoned a teaching career for the Churchill commission and repaired to a house near Oxford which he custom-designed for the job. This became the freelance historian’s dream palace, filled with manuscript tables, charts, tracked lighting, an academic version of Churchill’s Operations Room. Still, for all this production-line efficiency, he is really a throwback to the heroic grand tradition of 19th Century multi-tomed political biography. He has constructed a colossal historical mausoleum from millions of minute bricks of information, all impeccably arranged according to the strictest laws of chronological narrative. It need hardly be said that this titanic style of historical biography is unfashionable. Few working historians nowadays have the time to contemplate anything as grandiose. Even fewer, though, have the inclination. Instead they favor precisely the opposite approach, in which small episodes are invested with exemplary significance, and are more often on social than political topics. Death is altogether a more fashionable subject these days than war or taxes. The panoramic canvas has been replaced by the historiographical micro-chip.

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    Immured in his commission, Gilbert is fantastically and unapologetically positivist, setting down almost every known fact about his hero, and in some cases many competing versions of a single event. No aspect of Churchill’s politics, or his conduct of the war, or his working methods, or even his family life has been omitted. The color of his siren suits (blue or red), the strength of his whiskies and soda (surprisingly weak)–all is presented for us to sift and sort, retain or dismiss, as we see fit. This is history not just as chronicle but as total recall. It is also deliberately impersonal, a presentation in which the historian abdicates the role of commentator, critic, or interpreter. Gilbert writes as if Tacitus and Gibbon had never penned a line. There are no judgments, not the merest hint of a cavil. Nor are there the conventional literary framings–no fanfare at the outset, nor drumroll at the conclusion. The narrative simply begins: ”At eleven o’clock on the morning of September 3rd 1939…” and goes on like that for another 1274 pages. It is a Churchilliad, and Gilbert is its bard.

    What is it like to read? Reading is not really what one does with a Gilbert Churchill, any more than with say, Pepys’ diary. Confronted with this mighty ocean of narrative the only possible response is total immersion. The great tidal wave of detail plunges the reader almost involuntarily into Churchill’s life during the first two grim years of the war. One does not so much read the 1ife, one accompanies it, as if peering over Churchill’s burly shoulder. Of course the life itself is not without interest. It has already drawn biographers like moths to the flame, and they have usually been badly singed. In the past year alone, the humdrum Ted Morgan and the portentous William Manchester have both made an effort to capture the young Churchill. Manchester’s slap-dash study, with its cartoon-strip account of British politics and culture and its rhinestone-studded prose, looks particularly gaudy alongside the Churchilliad.

    Gilbert has been faithful to Randolph Churchill’s injunction–”he shall be his own biographer'” and allowed his subject to tell much of the story through speeches, conversations and letters, as well as official documents. The recollections of personal secretaries, civil servants, young staff aides, and the good use of memoirs lend intimacy and immediacy to Gilbert’s vast collective portrait There are unforgettable vignettes: receiving an assistant during the Blitz “wrapped only in a huge bath towel looking like one of the later Roman Emperors”; singing “Ole Man River” in his car after speaking in Parliament of the Anglo-American relationship that ”like the Mississippi just keeps rolling along”; pressing the revolting concoction of Bovril and sardines on a politely amenable aide; rapping on a front door and greeting the butler with a cheery “Goebbels and Goering here to report”; and dictating to his secretary from his flower-chintzed four-poster, chewing a cigar, sipping soda water and fidgeting his toes beneath the bedclothes.

    The history, though, is not just chatty gossip. Against all odds, it succeeds in conveying the frightening bleakness of the spring of 1940, when Hitler seemed unstoppable and European democracy appeared to be closing down for the season. What followed in Britain for the remainder of that year is one of the most stirring chronicles of modern history, the majestic moral dimension of which has been blown away by Woukian winds of cliche and the debasement of Churchillian rhetoric. (A Congressman was recently heard to say that the invasion of Grenada was America’s ”finest hour.”) Amidst all folk memories of Britain Can Take It and the comforting irrevocability of Churchill’s eventual triumph, it is easy to forget just how desperate the crisis was when he became Prime Minister. That May 10th was one of the worst days of the war, when the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland and the awesome power of the Blitzkrieg was made apparent in the West. The ”phoney war” had culminated in the miserable fiasco of the Norwegian landings, and consternation had replaced uncertainty as the dominant mood of the country. The effect of Churchill’s appointment to the supreme office he had always coveted was electrifying. By sheer force of personality, transmitted to the British Parliament and to the people through radio broadcasts, he turned fear into fortitude. By telling the truth he actually made things seem better, not worse. As Harold Nicolson shrewdly noted, the same words in Neville Chamberlain’s mouth would have left his audience in a mood of dejection; in Churchill’s they sounded a note of hope and defiance. There is no question that this was one of the rare moments in history when the presence of a single man altered what was, and was not, possible.

    How did he make that difference? Precisely because of its painstaking elaboration of detail, Martin Gilbert’s book is the only account that can show the mechanics of inspiration at work. In essence they were the result of the extraordinary effect that Churchill’s own unambiguous dedication and his jaunty bravura had on others–on immediate colleagues, on junior ministers, on the people at large. This peculiar chemistry, the essence of Churchillian charisma, can be reduced to four elements.

     The first indispensable component of his leadership was staggeringly and indefatigably hard work. Churchill was 61 when he became Prime Minister, but his hours and his devotion to detail left his bright young assistants dropping in their tracks. In the 1930s he had mastered the most intricate military information, so that he could out-brief the government ministers he harried so mercilessly in the House of Commons. When he was First Lord of the Admiralty at the outset of the war, and beset with naval emergency, he discovered somehow that there was an insufficient supply of fish being caught off the coast. In went the details; out went the famous order, “We must have a policy of utmost fish. Report before midnight.” His capacity to absorb, analyze, and act on mountains of material was an immense asset. It meant that he delegated work as sense rather than laziness commanded. It also instilled a healthy respect among subordinates for their chief’s omniscience.

    The second element in Churchill’s leadership was his impressively detailed grasp of military strategy. It is easy to overlook the obvious fact that, more than any of the other war leaders, and certainly more than either Stalin or the warlords in Berlin and Rome, Churchill was in his own right a great commander. This is not to say that he did not commit blunders during the war–he was perhaps still too much haunted by the ghosts of Gallipoli and too much attracted to “sideshows” in the Balkans and the Aegean. But he had an unerring nose for fine commanders, and he stuck by them even when they were drawing flack from their staff Sir Hugh Dowding, the chief of Fighter Command, still for the most part unsung in Britain, was both a genius and a hero, and Churchill only let him go after the contest for British skies had been won and Dowding was plainly prostrated by the effort. Most of all, Churchill’s detailed grasp of logistics and strategy meant that he could talk to his generals and admirals directly, and construct with them at each moment of the war a careful order of priorities.

    The third component of Churchill’s charisma was that for which he is most remembered: the passion and the dignity of his rhetoric. Martin Gilbert cites many of his speeches, familiar and unfamiliar, at pleasing length and in full metaphorical ripeness. The thickness of this documentation makes it possible to see just how the great orations were put together from the capacious filing cabinet of his literary memory and the emotional impetus of the moment. The notion of anything so intellectually supine as a speech writer, let alone a bank of them, would have appalled Churchill, not only because his feeling for the cadences and the inflections of the language was so fine, but because during the war rhetoric was not manipulated for personal promotion. It is apparent that Churchill’s speech as broke the crust of the British class system and brought together those divided by accent, manners, education and fortune. He played on his oratory like some mighty brass instrument, muting and swelling as occasion demanded. When he addressed the French–“Francais, c’est mol , Churchill qui vous parle”–he conscripted the ghost of Napoleon exhorting his troops against the Prussians, but was tactful enough not to mention that the occasion was Waterloo. At least one of his listeners thought, “every word was like a transfusion of drops of blood.”

    None of this could have been accomplished by mere technical facility. Churchill made his listeners brave because his own moral clarity led him to attribute the best possible motives to his compatriots. Thus he associated them with his own resoluteness. “If this island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

    The last quality of Churchill’s was, in the end, that on which the rest depended: his unswerving moral decency. This shines through the pages of Gilbert’s account, without any effort by the author to canonize his subject. For Churchill’s goodness was not to be confused with saintliness. He savored power and authority as he did a fat cigar and during his long career had made more than his share of blunders. He was not wartless–but his warts were just that, imperfections on the face of virtue.

    Winston Churchill emerges as a generous man, even to a fault. He despised vindictiveness and stood loyally by some who did not always deserve his kindness. He showed exceptional tenderness to Neville Chamberlain, and through the long period of his cancer never neglected to brief Chamberlain on every piece of business. When Chamberlain died in November 1940, Churchill cried at his bier, and reserved one of his most moving speeches for the memorial service. All this was transparently sincere and deeply felt.

    Churchill, who had so protean a career, remained hopeless as a party tactician. He had never really felt comfortable with the clubland Tories, and was as near to populist as any British politician can come. His wife was quite right in her attempt to persuade him to decline the leadership of the Conservatives when Chamberlain died. She understood that for better or worse he had acquired iconic status as a symbol of the endurance of British culture.

    This was because Churchill embodied, without ever meaning to, a glorious illusion about British history: that at its heart lay a family bond that transcended all divisions of class and party. It was typical that although he loathed his old school, Harrow, he consented to visit it on condition that the boys sang the school songs; he went away watery-eyed, with the feeling that he had touched the national spirit once more. In retrospect it seems almost a historical miracle that, at a time when they were so mercilessly tested, the western democracies managed to throw up two leaders–Roosevelt, of course, the other–who inspired not only respect but love.

    None of this adds up to a definitive answer as to why Britain survived. There are more impersonal reasons to be found in this book, and in others: Hitler’s folly in abandoning the strikes on airfields for the cities; the German failure to press an invasion in the summer of 1940; their inability to close the Atlantic routes. There are other, quieter heroes: Dowding; the long-suffering Pug Ismay who served as Chief of Staff in the most gloomy times; Harry Hopkins, on whom Churchill pinned his hopes for an Anglo-American alliance. There are the unsung and the anonymous: fighter pilots without whose inexhaustible courage the battle for the skies over Britain would have been lost. There are inimitable stiff upper lips all over the place, the stiffest of all belonging to the butler of the Reform Club who answered the phone the night that Pall Mall was put to the torch and responded to a request for information with a Jeevesian “The Club is burning, sir.”

    In all these circumstances and contingencies, however, nothing stands out from Gilbert’s monumental account more clearly than Churchill’s own part in moving his countrymen to extraordinary efforts and sacrifices. He told the millions who hung on every word that issued from the wireless that “the curse of Nazism will be lifted from the brow of mankind” and “that wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred” would be vanquished. In private, Churchill was not always so sanguine. He forced himself and others, he admitted, to be brave “because everyone realised how near death and ruin we stood. Not only individual death which is the universal experience, but incomparably more commanding the life of Britain, her message and her glory.”

    The terror of imminent extinction flickers intermittently through Martin Gilbert’s crowded narrative. But whenever it begins to rise with the tempo of accumulating disasters, Churchill’s presence, too, rises above the panic, like a great granite cliff. I suppose that is what our parents felt and what sustained them in the nightmare of 1940. This is a rare thing then: a vast biography in which the stature of its subject is enhanced rather than diminished with every page and every document. The only somber reflection on putting it down is the certainty that we shall not look upon his like again.