WINSTON CHURCHILL: THE FLAWED GENIUS OF WORLD WAR II
By Christopher Catherwood
Berkley Caliber, $26.95, 326 pages
REVIEWED BY MARTIN SIEFF
Christopher Catherwood, a distinguished British historian, has written an enjoyable, opinionated, highly readable but also, alas, fundamentally silly and flawed book.
Mr. Catherwood is no cheap, biased Churchill basher. He gives the legendary British leader his full due for recognizing the dangers of Nazism, warning in vain of the correct way to nip the rising evil in the bud during the 1938-39 period, and performing brilliantly as war premier in 1940-41 when Britain stood alone.
However, the main thrust of Mr. Catherwood’s book is that Churchill was catastrophically wrong in delaying the invasion of Europe from spring 1943 to June 1944.
There is nothing new about these arguments. They were originally made by British and American communist followers and dupes of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin through 1942 and 1943, and they have been periodically revived by revisionist historians on both sides of the Atlantic ever since.
Mr. Catherwood has no new facts, major archival sources or even new arguments to present. He is scathing about Churchill’s many tactical miscalculations, bungles and outright disasters, but these have been acknowledged and documented in mainstream British historiography now for more than nearly half a century.
It is perfectly true that Churchill’s repeated determination to launch ambitious “sideshow” amphibious operations uniformly led to fiasco or catastrophe in Norway, West Africa, Greece, Crete and Rhodes. But on the central issue of ensuring the new American and British armies developed the professionalism and experience they needed to take on their main opponent, the German Wehrmacht in Western Europe, he was totally correct. And outstanding American military historians like Carlos D’Este and Douglas Porch have recognized it. But you will find no hint of these arguments in Mr. Catherwood’s book.
Mr. Catherwood is also oddly eclectic in the previously published historians he favors. The reader will look in vain for any reference to Mr. D’Este’s recent military biography of Churchill, “Warlord,” or to Douglas Porch’s magnificent “Theater of Victory” — the definitive overall history of World War II in the Mediterranean Theater. There is no acknowledgment that, as Mr. Porch documents, the Mediterranean operations tied down more than 50 Wehrmacht divisions through and beyond D-Day.
Nor is there a single reference in Mr. Catherwood’s index to the Battle of the Atlantic and its crucial climax in the great convoy battles of May 1943. Yet until that point, it was impossible to build up the millions of U.S. ground troops in Britain needed to liberate Europe.
Also, Mr. Catherwood nowhere seriously addresses the very real question of what would have happened if the Allies had indeed landed in Western Europe in 1943 before the huge battles of Kursk, the liberation of Ukraine and Operation Bagration, the annihilation of the Ostherr’s Army Group Center in Byelorussia, which had been fought and won by the Red Army on the Eastern Front.
Had the Allies managed to launch D-Day in the West a year earlier in summer 1943, it would have been on a far smaller scale and the main strength of the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military force the world had seen since Genghis Khan 700 years earlier, would not yet have been ground down in its huge battles against the Soviets. Adolf Hitler would therefore have been free to switch hundreds of thousands of those troops to the West to make mincemeat of the still green and untested new Anglo-American armies sent up against them too soon.
Mr. Catherwood also nowhere addresses the exceptionally successful U.S. Eighth Army Air Force campaigns with long-range fighter escorts that quite literally shot the Luftwaffe out of the skies over central Germany in January-April 1944. It was the USAAF that won the total air superiority which saved tens of thousands of Allied lives during the Normandy battles and then played a crucial role in winning the war in the West. Yet it would not have been possible without the air-war victory over Germany first.
Even where Mr. Catherwood is correct in criticizing Churchill, he is only repeating arguments that have already been widely accepted for more than 40 years. And where he is wrong, he refuses to acknowledge even the existence of the most authoritative and up-to-date U.S. and British scholarship that contradicts him.
In the end, this is an entertaining, but very patchily documented and coarsely argued book that is just plain wrong.
• Martin Sieff is a veteran foreign correspondent. He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting.
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