Churchill’s Phoney War: A Study in Folly and Frustration. Graham T. Clews. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2019.
Winston Churchill’s image has become virtually synonymous with his World War II leadership, with an array of biographies and monographs cementing the narrative of Britain standing alone against an overwhelming Nazi aggressor through his leadership and oratory. This scholarship, ranging from Martin Gilbert’s exhaustive eight-volume official biography to William Manchester’s popular The Last Lion series and John Lukac’s Five Days in London, May 1940 or Andrew Robert’s recent Churchill: Walking with Destiny, has by turns recounted and dissected seemingly every aspect of Churchill’s wartime record. Yet, in many ways these works tend more toward hagiography than systematic analysis of either Churchill’s strategic thinking or the actual effectiveness of his policies both at home and in military action. This disconnection between the reality of Churchill’s wartime leadership and the memory of it is not an accident, but instead the result of Churchill’s own careful editorial efforts in his six-volume memoir, The Second World War, published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, something David Reynolds masterfully elucidates in In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War. Reynolds shows that Churchill carefully edited documents to cloak or soften some of his strategic blunders in an effort to revitalize his political reputation in the short term and solidify his historical legacy in the long term.
Churchill should not be seen as a singular strategic tyrant but as a figurehead of a much larger community of functionaries conditioned to understand strategy through a mental model that still centered on the grand fleet engagement as the crux of naval policy.
Churchill’s wartime record as a political leader and strategist has inspired a new generation of historians to reexamine many of these hagiographic tropes, often drawing on previously unavailable sources. Scholars include Richard Toye who reexamines the actual political effectiveness of Churchill’s wartime oratory in The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches, or Christopher M. Bell who places Churchill’s wartime use of naval forces into a larger narrative about his understanding of sea power in the aptly named Churchill and Sea Power. Both authors have tempered and complicated the acclaim and the critiques of his time in power. Similarly, Brian Lavery’s Churchill Warrior: How a Military Life Guided Winston’s Finest Hours scrutinizes Churchill’s evolution as a military strategist across the first half of the twentieth century and shows him to be both an innovative military theorist and a complex strategic realist, far from the image of the man as either a blundering buffoon or a singular heroic savior that dominates much of the older literature.
Graham T. Clews’ Churchill’s Phoney War: A Study in Folly and Frustration is a welcome addition to this body of work, continuing to fill holes in the larger examination of Churchill’s wartime leadership. Clews examines Churchill’s leadership from his return to the Admiralty in September 1939 until he assumed the premiership of Great Britain in May 1940. Churchill downplayed this period in his memoirs, relegating his account to a few defensive chapters at the end of his first volume. This effort at mitigation reflected the confused, and often contradictory, nature of his strategic decision making during the period. On one level, Churchill immersed himself in the business of his office: naval policy. Clews explores Churchill’s machinations on a variety of naval issues, most notably U-boat protection. On the one hand, critics often castigate Churchill for his resistance towards extensive use of convoys in favor of offensive anti-submarine sweeps of warships armed with new sonar technology. Yet, Clews demonstrates that Churchill actually reflected broader Admiralty thinking that vacillated between anxiety about diminished trade and shipping losses and struggles to adapt to a rapidly evolving environment shaped by technology as much as by naval tactics. This is a recurring theme in Clews’ work: interpreting Churchill as part of a larger institutional and intellectual framework that struggled to grapple with the myriad strategic challenges and factors that bombarded decision makers. In the case of the convoy issue, the political realities of diminished trade and shipping losses collided with institutional inflexibility on the part of Admiralty leaders, which technological factors like limitations in sonar’s ability to easily detect U-boats and the German introduction of magnetic sea mines amplified. Churchill’s Admiralty leadership also provides some stark lessons for modern strategists, most notably the danger of myopic fixation on a single issue while losing track of the larger strategic situation. In this light, Churchill should not be seen as a singular strategic tyrant but as a figurehead of a much larger community of functionaries conditioned to understand strategy through a mental model that still centered on the grand fleet engagement as the crux of naval policy.
In the monograph’s second half, Clews similarly turns his attention to Churchill’s role in the evolution of Britain’s larger war strategy, revealing more than a solo voice campaigning for an aggressive or innovative military strategy in the face of intransigence on the part of Britain’s dominant military and political leaders. Rather, we see Churchill as a frequently rivalrous collaborator with other members of the Chamberlain government—competing for resources and operational control even while agreeing with Neville Chamberlain on almost every aspect of British strategy. The Chamberlain government struggled not with dissension in the ranks but with a lack of strategic direction during a rapidly shifting situation, especially during early 1940.
That said, Churchill held a rather unique position within the British Cabinet during the early months of the war, functioning as a de facto Minister of Defense and involving himself in almost every aspect of British military planning and strategy. This broad authority reflected Chamberlain’s confidence in his ability to check Churchill’s more untenable policy initiatives, but also Churchill’s political ascendency, both due to his early and vociferous objections to Nazism and his burgeoning relationship with President Roosevelt. Yet, for all of his involvement in British military planning, Churchill struggled as much as the rest of the British government to determine a wise strategy to pressure Germany without significantly escalating the military situation.
Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain (Wikimedia)
This was the backdrop for Britain’s misadventures in Norway during the spring of 1940. Clews astutely dissects the political and operational intricacies of this action, and he renders a balanced assessment of Churchill’s strategic view. On the one hand, Churchill’s Norwegian operation was certainly flawed and likely would have done little to gain strategic initiative or put significant pressure on a German government already committed to a war in the west. It also suffered from the same intra-Admiralty indecisiveness that characterized the convoy issue, but magnified by the scale and scope of an amphibious operation. At the same time, it typified Churchill’s strategic thinking, which often conceptualized bold operations that relied on technology and timing yet outstripped the imagination of military leaders or the institutional flexibility of their services.
Despite all of his blundering in naval policy and military operations, Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940 because of the devolving strategic situation after Germany invaded Belgium and France. Ironically, this was a situation that actually favored Churchill’s skill set, both politically and strategically, and this aptitude dramatically reframed both contemporary and historical perception that otherwise might have been colored by his earlier ineffectiveness.
Clews’ book certainly fills a void in the study of Churchill during the Second World War, but it seems apparent when reading his account why no other author has undertaken a similarly focused examination. The inconclusive nature and complex minutia of political machinations and institutional debates that Clews’ title hints at tend to make the book heavy reading, and his organization—while systematic—can sometimes exacerbate this repetitive monotony. In many ways, Clews’ work would benefit from either greater length to provide more explanation of the political and institutional forces that Churchill engaged with or more aggressive editing to make the story he lays out flow more effectively. Clews’ analysis does provide a useful study in the difficulty of crafting a strategy that serves multiple constituencies and solves multiple problems. Modern students of strategy should take heart that they are in good company when they seek solutions to no-win scenarios.
Perry Colvin has a PhD in European History from Auburn University. He is currently working on a book on Churchill as a technocratic military theorist and strategist during World War I. He is a frequent contributor to an array of military history publications.
Have a response or an idea for your own article? Follow the logo below, and you too can contribute to The Bridge:
Enjoy what you just read? Please help spread the word to new readers by sharing it on social media.
Header Image: Winston Churchill (London Evening Standard)