THE VIEW FROM CHURCHILL

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. A Tale of Two Blenheims

2. The Playing Fields of Harrow and Sandhurst

3. Arrested in South Africa

4. Escape From a Pretoria Prison

5. Failure at the Dardanelles

6. Another Look at Gallipoli

7. An Ottoman Endgame

8. In the Trenches at Plugstreet

9. Churchill Returns to Westminster

10. Winston of Arabia

11. Return to Mesopotamia

12. Weekends in the Country; Countries in a Weekend

13. The Storm Gathers Over Europe

14. Neville Chamberlain Stumbles Towards War

15. Hitler Chews the Carpets in Munich

16. Poland and Czechoslovakia: What-if History

17. Underground in the War Cabinet Rooms

18. Italian Stalemates at Monte Cassino and Anzio

19. From Roosevelt’s Hyde Park to Yalta

20. The Terms of Yalta

21. Churchill - On the Road Again

22. The Great Success of Failure

Places and Books

Acknowledgements

Copyright Permissions

The Cycling Historian

About the Bicycle

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated with love to my British family, Helen and Liam, and now to Laura

INTRODUCTION

I had not thought I was stalking the legacy of Winston Churchill until I realised, reading one of his biographies, that I had visited many of the places important in his life.

The revelation came as a surprise, as I have rarely undertaken a trip specifically in search of Churchill. In the last forty years, however, I have visited his birthplace at Blenheim Palace (not to mention the battlefield in Germany for which it is named) and Chartwell, his weekend house in Kent; the veld where he was captured on the battlefields of the Boer War in South Africa and his prison in Pretoria; the dusty hillsides at Gallipoli in Turkey where his political career fell into ruins; and his national creations around the Middle East (the borders of Syria, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine all bear his trademarks). I have also sensed his historical presence in Iran, India, Russia, and throughout the Far East, for example in Singapore, which he left undefended to a Japanese invasion, with the big guns pointed seaward, in the opposite direction from which the attack was launched. From Morocco to Malaysia, if you check into a fancy hotel, invariably you will discover a plaque indicating when and in which room Churchill stayed. (Of London he liked to say, I don’t stay in a hotel. I stay in Brown’s.)

Despite such devotion to the times and places of Churchill, I rarely think of myself as a man on pilgrimage. I don’t have pictures of Churchill hanging in my office, and I cannot say that I stand in awe of his political career, despite admiring his leadership during World War II. (A lesser man might have surrendered England.) For whatever reason, when I think of Churchill I often reflect less on his successes than on his failures: the botched attacks on the Dardanelles in 1915, his tone-deafness over India, and the 1919 intervention in the Russian civil war, his legacy in the Middle East (we’re still paying for his poor judgment in Iraq), and his deadly adventures in places such as Trondheim and Dieppe. At the same time, I often enjoy having Churchill as a plumb line in my travels, as his peripatetic life (from 1874 to 1965) and his obsession with being the man on the spot no matter what the crisis make him an eyewitness to many events in 20th century history that interest me.

I cannot say that I am a serious Churchill scholar. In every school I attended, there were collections of Churchilliana in the libraries, including his multi-volume histories of World Wars I and II, but growing up I read only a handful of these books. I remember buying the first volume of Churchill’s account of the Duke of Marlborough when I was in high school. I was led to it not so much by a thirst to grasp the tactics that, in 1704, allowed the English, German, Dutch, and Danish coalition to defeat the French, as by the circumstance that Churchill’s work had appeared on a list of books that had influenced the young John F. Kennedy. That connection had piqued my interest. I never got past page twenty-five, and I remained sketchy about the life and times of the first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, until the summer of 2009 when I took my children camping in Germany and we biked around the battlefield of Blenheim.

Even now, I have read relatively few of the many Churchill biographies (literally hundreds have been published.) I have read neither the multi-volume official biography by Martin Gilbert, nor the more celebrated life, in one volume, by Roy Jenkins. Nor have I read more than a few volumes in Churchill’s own autobiographical works, which begin with My Early Life (1874–1904). I did like and admire Richard Holmes’s In Churchill’s Footsteps, an appreciation of his life and time. In recent years I have also read William Manchester’s three-volume biography of Churchill, The Last Lion, which for a long time ended in the early days of World War II. (After Manchester died, his friend, journalist Paul Reid, wrote the third volume from the surviving materials.) I do admire Violet Asquith Bonham-Carter’s Winston Churchill: As I Knew Him, an account into the 1920s of their personal friendship. Much of her book dwells on his impatience, although in a way that makes him more human and substantial. From David Reynolds’s In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, I realized that rather than composing his books as a lonely author, Churchill presided over his memoirs as the chairman of the composition committee.

Mostly, however, my extended reading about Churchill has come from the military and diplomatic histories I have squeezed into my suitcases to make sense of places I was visiting. For example, on a 1985 trip to the Anzio beachhead near Naples, I read several books about that ill-fated campaign, including Raleigh Trevelyan’s excellent Rome ’44: The Battle for the Eternal City, in which Churchill makes cameo appearances from London. At Gallipoli, I used for a guide several books about the battle, including one by Robert Rhodes James, who also published a critical biography of Churchill with the subtitle: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 (the period when many things Churchill touched turned to mud). In Australia in the 1980s, I read Christopher Thorne’s excellent Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945, which is about the differing war aims of Churchill and Roosevelt. Not long ago, in South Africa, I read Candice Millard’s Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill, an account of his detention at Ladysmith and flight from a jail in Pretoria.

Living in Europe for the past thirty years (I grew up in New York and was in grammar school when Churchill died), I have often gone in search of the battle lines from World Wars I and II, and Churchill was a participant and keen observer in both of those conflicts. For example, in London (in the War Cabinet Rooms beneath Whitehall), Belgium (he served as a battalion officer in the lines at Ploegsteert), Italy (in both wars, Churchill was in endless search of Germany’s soft underbelly), and Turkey (notably the Dardanelles but also in Iskenderun, formally Alexandretta), I often find the Churchill story to be more instructive than the guide at hand, which explains why many of the books I have taken with me in my travels have a Churchill component.

Here’s an example: I once spent a very happy café hour in the old city of Damascus, where I had gone (before the civil war) with my son Charles, then fourteen. He had gone in search of souvenirs, notably a travel-sized backgammon set, and I settled into a rooftop café that overlooked the Grand Mosque (and also the souk below, so I could watch Charles make his way around the souvenir stalls). There, over Turkish coffee, I spent a very pleasant hour reading David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, which makes the point that the world is still living with the borders that Churchill (among others) drew in the sand.

As an American student doing a junior year abroad in 1974–75, I first came across Churchill’s footprints when, together with some others in my program, I visited Blenheim Palace, about nine miles from Oxford. In subsequent years, I found myself at Gallipoli (in Turkey); on the Boer War battlefields in South Africa; in India and Pakistan where he served as an officer; at Cassino and Anzio in Italy; and at Ploegsteert, Belgium—all places on Churchill’s compass. At nearly every stop, I was reminded that Churchill was an odd mixture of personal fortitude and some of the worst political judgment in the 20th century. He often said that he had not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire—which he served bravely from the Northwest Frontier Territory to the Normandy beaches. At the same time, during the course of his lifetime and after, imperial Great Britain shrank from an empire on which the sun never set to something that now feels like London and some surrounding suburbs.

Churchill badgered and blustered his way in the world while writing forty-five books, finishing hundreds of paintings, and serving in numerous British governments. (The others in power, in both parties, may not have liked him, but they didn’t think they could get on without him.) On many political questions—from Turkey to Ireland and India—Churchill was often dead wrong, for all his bravado. At the same time, I enjoy following his footprints around the world, if only because—for me anyway—they reduce complex issues of war, peace, imperialism, and colonisation to concrete images I can understand. (If you ever want to understand the complexities of the Middle East, drive out from Cairo and have lunch along the banks of the Suez Canal, where England, France, Israel, and Egypt have fought savage wars of peace.) Churchill didn’t manage to save the empire but he did leave his stamp on many worlds, and in my wanderings I have been a