‘There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1946. “It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot . . . but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.”
The purpose of Churchill and the Avoidable War is to ascertain the extent to which this remarkable, poignant, and, if true, utterly tragic statement is accurate. No one is better qualified to answer it than Richard Langworth, who is Churchill’s vicar-on-earth, a man whose encyclopedic knowledge of Winston Churchill and willingness to defend him—though not always entirely uncritically—is legendary in Churchillian circles.
This book does not follow the expected route of pillorying Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, and Neville Chamberlain, the British prime ministers of the 1930s who failed to stand up to Hitler until that terrible decade was all but three months over. Indeed, surprisingly enough, the word “appeasement” doesn’t even appear in the text. Langworth does not attach moral blame to their generally earnest, well-meaning attempts to avoid war, instead quoting Churchill’s own appreciation of Chamberlain, who, he said, “acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle.”
Langworth looks carefully at Churchill’s own prescriptions and actions during the “locust years” of the thirties, largely through the welcome prism of Churchill’s own speeches and writings and votes in Parliament. One of the great pleasures of this excellent book, besides its honesty and intellectual rigor, lies in its selection of Churchill’s most powerful and moving, witty and scintillating speeches from the “wilderness years,” which saw an outpouring of Churchillian rhetoric to rival even the more famous wartime speeches themselves.
In November 1945, Churchill recalled how, years earlier,
Although Langworth fully agrees that Hitler could have been stopped, he controversially and thought-provokingly argues that Churchill did not, in fact, do all he could to bring this about. Yet he doesn’t deny that Churchill was far in advance of most of his contemporaries in appreciating the danger posed by Hitler, stating in 1938:
But when it came to effective action, Langworth argues that Churchill was laggardly in opposing Hitler directly. He warned powerfully against German rearmament in 1934, but did not directly call for war or the threat of war when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland. Instead, Churchill preferred a collective response to the Nazi threat based on French robustness in standing up for the provisions of the Versailles Treaty regarding a non-militarized Rhineland, something that was unlikely to be forthcoming given the demoralized state of French politics and society at the time. Langworth criticizes Churchill for never urging unilateral British action, but sheer geographical factors precluded it: The British and German armies weren’t contiguous anywhere in Europe and so Britain couldn’t have rebuffed Hitler leading to his overthrow.
Langworth readily acknowledges that “Churchill certainly would have backed French reoccupation of the Rhineland, at least of the bridgeheads in places like Cologne.” But when France “proved unwilling to act, he fell back on the League of Nations,” which proved an even less steady parapet than France had been. Langworth further points out that Churchill did not foresee Hitler’s union with Austria in 1938, known as the Anschluss, while admitting that he had warned about it in a general sense, likening Hitler to a boa constrictor that needed to take time to devour its prey before moving on to the next victim. Churchill simply misread the degree of Austrian support for the Anschluss once the threat became apparent, which in retrospect was genuinely strong.
Langworth is no revisionist historian, but he also takes Churchill to task for not opposing more forcefully Mussolini’s naked aggression in Abyssinia (1935) and the overgenerous provisions of the Anglo-German naval agreement that same year. However, he readily accepts that Churchill did spot that Czechoslovakia would be the Nazis’s next victim only six months after Austria, and his condemnation of the Munich agreement that led to Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment was sublime.
“Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness,” he said in the House of Commons once the agreement was signed by Hitler and Chamberlain:
Langworth also rightly applauds Churchill’s volte–face over the Soviet Union at this period, from being its sternest Western critic in the 1920s to appreciating its potential as an ally against the greater threat of Nazism in the 1930s. He also illustrates, with apposite quotations, that Churchill always believed that, had the United States not isolated itself after World War I, World War II might have been prevented. Writing after the war about the way that Chamberlain had rebuffed a prewar initiative from Franklin Roosevelt to act as a mediator in European affairs, which should have been grasped as an invaluable lifeline, Churchill stated:
Churchill and the Avoidable War is no hagiography: Langworth examines critically whether Churchill was right to set so much store by an alliance with Stalin, for example; but overall, he concludes:
It is no bad maxim of which to be reminded in the Age of Obama.
Hal Klepak’s Churchill Comes of Age, chronicling the three weeks that Churchill spent in Cuba in 1895 covering the civil war there as an army officer on leave, but also as a war correspondent for the British press, is a well-researched, well-written, and original aperçu into a little-known aspect of the Churchillian epic. Professor Klepak, who was a strategic analyst at NATO but who has also lived in Cuba and walked all of Churchill’s battlefields there, argues that Churchill really “came of age” in Cuba, where he came under fire for the first time, discovered his love of cigars and siestas, wrote his first military and political analyses, and was at the center of his first Anglo-American media controversy (for supporting the Spaniards against the locals). Having just returned from the central Cuban town of Arroyo Blanco—the place where Churchill was shot at on the day after his 21st birthday (not on his actual birthday, as Churchill alleged but Klepak disproves)—I can enthusiastically attest that the author’s descriptions of the locality are insightful and accurate. It is rare that we learn brand-new things about Winston Churchill’s micro-investigated life, but in this book we do.
Cuba also features prominently in Winston Churchill Reporting, Simon Read’s highly readable account of Churchill’s adventures as war correspondent, before he went on to report on the fighting on India’s North-West Frontier, the Omdurman campaign in the Sudan, and the Boer War in South Africa. Churchill’s mastery of the English language at school allowed him to present his experiences in vivid prose that still provokes admiration today, and his eagerness to take part in the fighting he describes—most notably in the last great British cavalry charge at the Battle of Omdurman and in the attempted rescue of an ambushed train in South Africa—catapulted him onto the national, and subsequently global, stage. Small wonder that he became the best-paid war correspondent in Britain and America, for as Read conclusively proves, Churchill was incapable of writing a boring sentence.
There is an old publishing saw that states: “Of the writing of books about Winston Churchill there shall be no end”—and long may it continue to be true. With books still being produced of the quality of this trio, we can still learn things about the greatest Englishman in history.
Andrew Roberts is the author, most recently, of Napoleon: A Life.
