Winston Churchill's War Leadership by Sir Martin Gilbert Page A

They have had a very hard time.” Following the election defeat, Churchill became Leader of the Opposition and, working within the parliamentary system he had espoused all his life, led his Party to victory in 1951. One of the underlying strengths of his war leadership—his determination to see the victory of democracy over dictatorship—served to bring him back to power with another full national agenda, including an attempt to avert a nuclear war by means of a renewal of conferences and discussions at the highest level with Stalin’s successors. As he told a group of senators and congressmen in Washington in June 1954: “Communism is a tyrant but meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” His war leadership had confirmed his belief that war, however justified it might be, was for the combatants (in his phrase of 1909) “vile wicked folly & a barbarism,” that statesmen had a duty to try to avert.
    Between 1936 and 1939 Churchill had believed that a European war could be averted by the unity and strength of all threatened states. That unity had not been created, nor had those who were most in danger built up sufficient armaments to be able to deter an aggressor by themselves. From 1946, when he spoke at Fulton, Missouri, about the “Iron Curtain,” Churchill used his experience of the pre-war years, and his knowledge of how hard it had been in wartime to secure victory as a result of pre-war neglect, to advocate direct talks with the new adversary, the Soviet Union. These discussions should be held at the highest level, he said, and be based on Anglo-American (and, in due course, European) unity and strength, to secure an amelioration of international tensions. In both war and peace his leadership bore the hallmarks of clarity of vision, strength of purpose, and faith in the ultimate victory of decency and goodwill.
    The comments of those who saw Churchill in action at close quarters during the war give an insight into his leadership qualities during those five hard years. From these contemporary remarks, made in the first year and a half of his premiership when the dangers were greatest— remarks that Churchill himself never saw—I have chosen sixteen that reflect his qualities in all their variety, and mark out his leadership as something rare among the twentieth-century war leaders: “galvanizing people at all levels,” “a manifestly humane person,” “no rigidity of mind,” “nothing can frighten him,” “a gentle, almost paternal smile,” “ready as always with confident advice,” “ceaseless industry,” “strength, resolution, humour, readiness to listen,” “a wonderful tonic,” “enough courage for everybody,” “really he has got guts,” “in wonderful spirits, and full of offensive plans,” “innately lovable and generous,” “amazing grasp of detail,” “full of the most marvellous courage, considering the burden he is bearing,” and, in tandem with this last and at the centre of all Churchill’s leadership struggles and decisions, “carrying the heaviest burden of responsibility any man has ever shouldered.”
    Reflecting towards the end of his life on her father’s war leadership, Churchill’s daughter Mary summed up a nation’s feelings when she wrote to him: “I owe you what every Englishman, woman & child does—Liberty itself.”

Note on Sources
    The material in this lecture is taken from my book
Churchill: A Life
, as well as from the six volumes of the Churchill biography, Winston S. Churchill, covering the years 1914 to 1965, and the eleven document volumes covering the years 1914 to 1941, which I have published over the past thirty years.

MARTIN GILBERT
    WINSTON CHURCHILL’S WAR LEADERSHIP
    Sir Martin Gilbert is Winston Churchill’s official biographer and a leading historian of the modern world. He is the author of seventy-three books, among them
Churchill: A
Life
, comprehensive studies of both the First and Second World Wars, and his three-volume