Concentrating on sideshows

It is becoming difficult to say anything new about Churchill as a war leader. The basic facts about the conduct of allied strategy have been known for many years. Diaries and memoirs, and the occasional loose anecdote, still dribble into the public domain, adding spice but nothing fundamental to our knowledge. What remains is analysis and opinion, and even that is a crowded field.

Max Hastings’ Churchill as Warlord, 1940-45 covers, within a narrower chronological frame, the same ground as Carlo d’Este’s recent book, Warlord: Churchill at War, 1874-1945. Hastings’ views are a good deal more balanced than d’Este’s, as well as being better researched and argued. But the essential point made by both authors is the same. Churchill’s role in enabling Britain to survive as a belligerent between the fall of France and the entry of Russia and the United States into the war, was indispensable and would probably have been beyond any one else.