March 24, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 42

Book Reviews – Churchill is a Gangster

Två kära ovänner [Two Dear Enemies]: Churchill och de Gaulle, by Knut Ståhlberg (text in Swedish). Norstedts, Stockholm, hardbound, illus., 342 pp., €9.99, €7.86 from amazon.de.

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By Francois Kersaudy

M. Kersaudy, former Fellow of Keble College Oxford and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of the seminal Churchill and de Gaulle (1981) and Winston Churchill, le pouvoir de l’imagination (2009).

Churchill is a gangster,” de Gaulle said, a few months before they walked in triumph on the Champs Elysées. In 1965 he said, “In the great drama, he was the greatest.”

The love-hate relationship between what many hold the two greatest figures of the 20th century is a worth- while subject that had never been dealt with before 1981, and has only fleetingly reemerged since then. A new “Churchill and De Gaulle” from Sweden is therefore a welcome addition, and as such well worth looking into. (A book entitled Churchill and de Gaulle, by Clifford Stossel, although announced in 2009, appears never to have been published.)

The book opens with a now-familiar description of the two elder statesmen as memoirists, closing with the hardly startling revelation that they gave divergent accounts of their mutual relations. The next chapter leads us briskly through the past careers of Churchill and de Gaulle, after which we can follow their first encounters during the dark year of 1940, including the fall of France, de Gaulle’s heading the Free French in London, Churchill’s immortal June speeches, the Blitz, the attack on the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir, and the raid on Dakar.

Next in line is a chronological ac- count of their confrontations: Syria and Lebanon, 1941; Bir Hachiem and the North African landings, 1942; the comedic meeting between de Gaulle and Giraud sponsored by Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca, 1943; Churchill’s vulnerability to Roosevelt’s Gaullophobia; the endless negotiations before de Gaulle’s arrival in Algiers at the end of May 1943; the Teheran Conference (without de Gaulle); a reconciliation of sorts at Marrakech in early 1944; the dramatic misunderstandings before D-Day; the liberation of Paris; Churchill’s triumphal visit to the capital; the campaign in north-east France; Yalta and beyond. Hostilities were followed by a mellowing of relations after the war, and de Gaulle’s presence at Churchill’s funeral.

The author’s prose is pleasant and even humorous at times. He knows how to tell a good story and maintains commendable objectivity in judging the two great leaders’ frequent tantrums. What then are the weaknesses of this generally entertaining book? For one thing, it is rather expeditious, what with a shortish text, further cramped by forty photographs. Second, the emphasis is more on the parallel lives of the two protagonists than on their meetings per se, which are dealt with rather briefly and appear as short summaries of accounts to be found elsewhere.

This may indeed hold true for the whole book, which often reads like a reproduction of the leaders’ memoirs, with a few excerpts from academic studies thrown in—hence the conspicuous absence of any revelations. There are no end notes, and important books referenced throughout the narrative do not even appear in the bibliography. Ståhlberg includes a list of French and British archives that can be used with profit, but he clearly had little time to visit them himself. In all, the book will seem vastly entertaining to non-English-speaking Swedes—a rare breed these days. The others may be re- minded of Yogi Berra’s immortal words: “Déjà vu all over again!”