In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War |
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In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War
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by David Reynolds
Sales Rank: 46025
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List Price: $19.95
$13.57
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on 6-20-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 672 pages
Published by: Basic Books; Reprint edition November 26, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0465003303
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0465003303
Book Dimensions:
9.2 x 6.1 x 2 inches
Weighs: 1.6 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
For many, the fact that Churchill won his Nobel for literature comes as a surprise, but he was a prolific—and very well paid—historian and journalist. Awarded Britain's Wolfson History Prize, this highly readable book by Cambridge historian Reynolds supplies the backstory to Churchill's massive postwar publishing project: the epic The Second World War. As the author notes, he's writing "a book about personal biography and public memory," beginning with Churchill's crushing defeat in the July 1945 election and offering a unique perspective on WWII, the onset of the Cold War and Churchill's determination to write the history of the 20th century's signal conflict. But Reynolds's real achievement is his grasp of the motives behind that determination: "Churchill's sense of the fickleness of fame impelled him to be his own historian." He quotes a 1944 letter to Stalin in which Churchill writes, "I agree that we had better leave the past to history, but remember if I live long enough I may be one of the historians." Packed with detail and vivid characterizations (but still clearly a scholarly, thoroughly researched work), it's a different take on one of the few men capable of both making history and writing it. 16 pages of black and white photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"We are all worms," the young Winston S. Churchill confided. "But I do believe I am a glow-worm." In his spin on World War II, told over six volumes and nearly 2 million words in which he depicts himself as seldom guilty of a mistake, Churchill indeed glows. Between 1923 and 1931, he had published a six-volume history of World War I and its aftermath, The World Crisis, which A.J. Balfour, a former prime minister, described as "Winston's brilliant Autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe." In that vein, David Reynolds, a Cambridge University historian, adroitly dissects Churchill's second vast war memoir, illuminating how and why it was written and its worth as narrative and chronicle. Churchill used his epics to build and buttress his reputation; In Command of History dismantles it.
The 1953 Nobel laureate for literature comes off here as rather deficient as a historian and human being. Eight years in the making, The Second World War earned millions in syndication and royalties that Churchill drew on to facilitate his self-indulgent lifestyle. Still, he was motivated more by his zeal for vindication than by financial greed or necessity. Ousted from office a month before the surrender of Japan in August 1945 as voters registered reluctance about having him manage the peace, he wanted to manipulate the way "his" war would be remembered.
When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he began to order official documents and correspondence set in type for his personal file, anticipating the history he knew he would one day publish. Having already "done" one war, he knew that it was easier to exploit contemporary papers than to write retrospective history. Also, time pressed. In his seventies when the war ended, he had survived several strokes, but he itched to be back in Downing Street. The project had to be completed while he was still in the political wilderness. And he had a plan.
He wrote history, Churchill once remarked, "the way they built the Canadian Pacific Railway. First I lay the track from coast to coast, and after that I put in the stations." He set up a sequence to shape the content, then employed research assistants, whom he called his "Syndicate," to gather relevant material and even ghost-write many of the chapters, each elaborately padded with "key pieces of evidence." (For The World Crisis, he apparently only cherry-picked his own documents.) His team included experts drawn from government, academe and the army. Churchill tweaked their drafts into his Augustan rhetorical style. He also deleted "many of the embarrassing parts" about his failures, especially where public bravado concealed private doubt.
To his credit, Reynolds reveals some haunting -- and humanizing -- examples drawn from the Churchill papers at Cambridge. Returning in June 1940 from visiting his tottering allies in France, the prime minister confessed to his military secretary, Gen. Hastings Ismay (later one of the Syndicate), "We fight alone."
"We'll win the Battle of Britain," Ismay insisted.
Bleakly, Churchill replied, "You and I will be dead in three months time."
Recalling this episode in July 1946, Ismay appealed to his interlocutor not to use it: "I would prefer that this intimate heart to heart conversation were never given to the world." Reynolds gives it to us.
The ongoing texts were typeset into galleys so that Churchill could see how they looked in print, but the Syndicate had no professional proofreader. That led to the description in one volume of the prewar French army as "the poop of the life of France." (Churchill meant "the "prop.") The error was more accurate than intended, but thereafter he engaged a professional to oversee the books' spelling and grammar.
Although Churchill was incensed when Time magazine referred in 1948 to his "squad of helpers," the press hardly noticed. As with many hyped books, critics reviewed the celebrity author, not the work. In a rare exception, Michael Foot, a journalist and member of Parliament, derided the initial volume in the Labour-affiliated Tribune newspaper as Churchill's Mein Kampf. And when parts of Samuel Eliot Morison's history of American naval operations were lifted for a chapter on the war at sea, Churchill only "rewrote the opening and sharpened some phrases." Morison noticed; unawed, he demanded future credit.
In the study at his home, Chartwell, usually after a well-lubricated dinner, Churchill would dictate dramatic, often embellished reminiscences that became the most striking aspects of the volumes. Some recollections were so personal (and so self-serving) that the Syndicate could not validate their authenticity. Having it both ways, Reynolds asserts that while "factual inaccuracy was balanced by poetic truth," the history, especially those parts told in the first person, is "willfully inaccurate," replete with "attempts to deceive his readers" (as in falsifying his schemes to thwart D-Day) and blatant cover-ups. As always, the purpose was to "reposition the image of Churchill."
Several tactics contributed to this. Churchill's centrality is enhanced by concealment and distortion (as with the agreements at Yalta, the advance on Berlin and various Churchillian strategic fiascos). Also, 20/20 hindsight is employed through a plethora of "counterfactuals," retrospective cases for the "ifs" of history -- things that allegedly weren't done, despite his urging. Reynolds also cites the gross suppressions in these pages. British anti-Semitism and the Nazi extermination camps vanish. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union remains only on the margins of Churchill's vision: The sweeping work includes almost nothing about the German catastrophe at Stalingrad, while El Alamein -- a lesser British victory at about the same time -- is magnified as the hinge of the war.
As the volumes soldiered on, and as his Labour successors began faltering, Churchill was also situating himself for a comeback. Writing now not only to vindicate his past stewardship but also to foreshadow his return to Downing Street (which he again inhabited from 1951 to 1955), he pulled his punches about autocrats and allies whom he abhorred (including Stalin, Tito and de Gaulle) and watered down his wrangles with Eisenhower.
Although Churchill conjured an epic, he wound up creating "a complicated literary text -- not entirely Churchill's work and not simply memoirs." Reynolds does not think this diminishes Churchill's achievement and suggests a parallel in the field of science, "where it is the norm for a major figure to direct a research group." Yet in a scientific publication, associated researchers are identified along with the primary author. Here, as Churchill intended, he stands alone. Beyond his financial incentives, he was fighting and managing two wars -- the historical one in which he was a senior statesman and a meddling strategist, and the emerging historiographical one that questioned his leonine self-image. The memoirs furnish an opportunity for Reynolds to examine Churchill's reinvention of his wartime role and the mechanics of his egocentric revisionism. Ironically, that may be their ultimate value. The history he wrote now seems much less magisterial than the history he made!
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Reviewed by Stanley Weintraub
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Hardcover)
Winston Churchill is instantly recognizable. He is eminently quotable, and is constantly cited as an example of visionary leadership. He stands for doggedness, steadfastness and persistence. Right after "he won his war," his own electorate tossed him out of office, and he needed work and money. He wrote a multi-volume definitive history of the war, "The Second World War," and "Command of History" is the story of the series' creation. The first theme is that some complex financial machinations were done in order for Churchill to avoid payment of 90%+ in income taxes on the book's royalties. It's funny to read this; the ultra-patriotic Churchill puts Al Lay to shame with his capitalistic self-interest. Another eye-opener, though, is the extent to which he used platoons of ghostwriters and collaborators in this highly successful and widely-read series. Churchill did not have complete personal knowledge of the war - he was not personally involved with the Eastern Front and the Pacific theater. These gaps were filled by his ghostwriters whose work was pretty much "cut and pasted" into the series. Not that there were no revisions - there was a lot of cycles, since he took over six years to produce this work. Some of the war's most memorable stories are recorded in the series, but there are also long passages of detail that lack much life or realism. The most disturbing thing about "In Command of History" is that we learn, once again, that any political leader, even one as worshipped as Churchill, is essentially self-serving. The book portrays Churchill's vanity and desire to take credit for good outcomes and shift blame for bad ones. To have to confront the fact that a work like Churchill's is, to an extent, "spin" and not the sort of hard history we'd thought is no fun, to be honest with you. Since it was contemporary history, Churchill also had to be careful not to offend Dwight Eisenhower and Anthony Eden, with whom he had to continue working in the postwar period. And he had to watch what he said about other countries, even the Soviet Union, for fear of causing a diplomatic incident. Did he hold back from criticizing Eisenhower's failure to take Berlin in 1945? Seems so. More understandably. he had to cover up some wartime secrets, like the British success in cracking German codes, which was not publicly revealed until 1974. Beyond these more obvious historical lapeses, though, Reynolds asserts that Churchill had to bend and sometimes break the historical record - for instance, by overstating his support for a cross-channel invasion. This has now solidified into historical fact, regardless of any subsequent evidence to the contrary. Politicians cannot stop being politicians. Reynolds is a historian critiquing a politician who fancied himself a historian, and also trying to sell books himself... Should you buy this book? Yes, but brace yourself for another deflation of an honored figure...
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