Churchill as war leader: myths and realities

While Churchill was a great orator and political strategist, he was not a great military strategist

Britain has just marked the fiftieth anniversary of Winston Churchill’s death, which is anchored in his premiership during the Second World War. We should celebrate a great orator and statesman, but we should not myopically deny Churchill’s limitations as a war leader.

In fact, the celebration of Churchill, by a nostalgic society roiled by separatism and immigration, has been regressive, epitomized by the BBC’s rebroadcast of gushing historical inaccuracies from previous decades (such as the claim that Churchill was a scientist) and Boris Johnson’s self-serving claim that Churchill was brilliant for his articulation of policy rather than his bumbling execution of it, which sounds uncomfortably like the Tony Blair administration’s and the George W. Bush administration’s attempts to identify themselves with Churchill.

Partly driving Churchill’s confidence in war was his divine perception of his own military skills, which, he believed, he had inherited from his illustrious ancestor – John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. His commission into the 4th Hussars owed more to wealth and his illustrious father’s political influence than aptitude (his formal test scores should have disqualified him from the Military College), which he soon gave up to become a military journalist, again through influence more than merit. This choice cut short his real military experience, so he never attended a staff course or a command course.

Yet he felt frustrated with lack of opportunities to prove his supposed divine skills, which he diverted into continuous political administration of defence from 1909 (at least on the Committee for Imperial Defence). This experience gave him wide knowledge of all the military departments, although he took less interest in the military than the politics. After stepping down from the Admiralty in October 1915, due to his administration of the disastrous interventions around the Dardanelles, he took command of a battalion in France, which was militarily undeserved, brief, and quiet. By June 1916 he was back in government.

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2015/02/05/churchill-as-war-leader-myths-and-realities/