I wasn’t really paying attention to world affairs yet during his second ministry, and I know that he was faulted for being an imperialist dead-ender, but at least in the popular imagination here, the wartime leader was regarded as a colossus, and Lukacs in his accounts returns repeatedly to his thesis that he was the essential, irreplaceable man for the crisis at a time when segments of the ruling class were disposed to accept for the nation a kind of genteel vassalage as the price for being left at least temporarily unmolested (he also makes the point that for the first few weeks after being named to the post, Churchill was obliged to walk a political tightrope, and not a really taut one at that).

As to oratory, my own library includes a volume of speeches selected by his grandson*, which of course features all of the Greatest Hits, but also many lesser-known pearls of great price. For example, regarding the opportunistic, ultimately ill-considered** entry of another belligerent into the conflict:

We are also told that the Italian Navy is to come out and gain sea superiority in these waters. If they seriously intend it, I shall only say that we shall be delighted to offer Signor Mussolini a free and safeguarded passage through the Strait of Gibraltar in order that he may play the part to which he aspires. There is a general curiosity in the British Fleet to find out whether the Italians are up to the level they were at in the last war or whether they have fallen off at all.

—We may hope that the Italian leader did not sneeze when these words were reported to him.

I think even those Americans who merely came of age in the aftermath, and even many who were of the age of reason during the main event, tend toward a foreshortened view of the conflict. We were, after all, well back from the actual theatres of war. No one was bombed apart from a distant archipelago, and while the butcher’s bill topped four hundred thousand dead, this was about one-third per capita the British toll, and practically a rounding error*** measured against the carnage in central and eastern Europe (the Soviet Union had some real demographic distortions going there for a while after the war). I’m grateful that North America was spared the wear and tear on the physical plant that large swatches of Eurasia endured, but I think a bit of that might have had a salutary effect on some of our generals during the Cold War: some of them, particularly in the USAF, were champing at the bit to have at the Red Russians, whereas their counterparts, having endured their country laid waste the one time, regarded the prospect of a nuclear encore with a pardonable want of enthusiasm.

Regarding cities bombed to rubble, I think it may fairly be said that Arthur Harris saw to it that Coventry was repaid with compound interest. A lamentable legacy of the conflict is that the aerial bombardment of civilian populations, at one time regarded with a horror approaching that in which the use of poison gas was held, has now come to be taken for granted as a legitimate instrument of warfare.

I’m gratified to learn that WSC still holds a place of esteem in his nation’s memory. I found the condescension with which he was treated in Hamilton’s account off-putting.

cordially,

*Also Winston S. Churchill, son of Randolph, of whom Evelyn Waugh wrote, on the occasion of the former’s undergoing surgery to remove a benign brain tumor, “A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”

**It might have been a difficult needle to thread, but had he contrived to keep Italy notionally neutral even though obviously sympathetic to Germany’s cause, he might have had a postwar career resembling Franco’s. Instead, of course, he perished ignobly, and gave rise to coarse jokes in the period of my childhood, such as “How did Mussolini end up with twenty-seven bullets in him? Two thousand Italian marksmen.”

***A rounding error in aggregate and not, to be sure, in specific bereavements.