Churchill and his Generals

Raymond Callahan begins his fine book with a splendid row. In April 1941 Major-General John Kennedy, the British army's director of military operations, was one of Churchill's dinner guests at Chequers. During the meal the discussion turned to the continued possibility of an invasion of Britain, and Kennedy remarked that the retention of Egypt was not as important as ensuring the security of the United Kingdom. Churchill's ire was raised. ‘Wavell has 400,000 men’, he snorted, ‘If they lose Egypt, blood will flow. I will have firing parties to shoot the generals’. Kennedy then dug himself a deeper hole by pointing out that Wavell had already made contingency plans for the loss of Egypt. ‘I have never heard such ideas’, fumed the prime minister, ‘War is a contest of wills. It is pure defeatism to speak as you have done’ (p. 2). The argument continued in the Great Hall after dinner until Churchill retired to bed at 3 am having reminded those present about the fate of Admiral Byng.

This is a study of Churchill's leading generals and his wartime relationships with them. It charts his mounting frustration with the army in the dark days of 1940–42, when retreat, evacuation and surrender seemed to be the order of the day, and his efforts to reinvigorate its performance on the battlefield. While Churchill's interventions in operational matters during this period are well known, what the author usefully brings out are the political pressures working on him. He desperately needed a military victory in order to silence growing criticism of his war leadership and to maintain Britain's credibility as a great power. As Brendan Bracken remarked, shortly before the battle of El Alamein: ‘The Prime Minister must either win his battle in the desert or get out’ (p. 131). With the turn of the tide in 1942, Churchill's attention seems to have shifted more towards matters of Allied strategy and diplomacy. But Callahan argues that this has tended to obscure the renaissance in the army during the second half of the war and, in particular, its remarkable successes in the Far East.

The real hero of the book is Lieutenant-General William ‘Bill’ Slim, the commander of the ‘forgotten’ 14^th Army in Burma. An ex-grammar school boy who had made his career in the unfashionable Indian Army, Slim's stunning victories over the Japanese in 1944–5 mark him out, in the view of the author, as Churchill's greatest wartime general. The irony was that the prime minister was not deeply interested in the campaign. As Callahan ruefully observes: ‘He was clearly the outstanding British Army commander of World War II and Britain's best field commander since Wellington. But Churchill never seems to have noticed’ (p. 234). Although the inclusion of some maps would have assisted the reader, this is a well-informed and incisively-written study that is a valuable addition to the literature on the British army during the Second World War.