A selection of my favourite quotes from Max Hasting's 'Finest Hours'

‘His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilise Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British faced the world united and exalted.  The ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ was not spontaneous.  It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time.  Under another PM, the British people in their shock and bewilderment could as readily have been led in another direction’.

‘The beams episode, in which CH supported an audacious ‘beams’ project to jam the guidance of German bombers over Britain showed CH at his best: accessible, imaginative, penetrating, decisive and always suggestible about technological innovation’.

‘Amid Britain’s sea of troubles, he represented a beacon of warmth and humanity, as well as of will and supreme courage, for which most of even the most exalted and sceptical of his countrymen acknowledged gratitude’.

‘One of CHs greatest achievements in those months was to convene every man and woman in the country that they had roles to play in the greatest drama in their history, even if the practical utility of their actions was often pathetically small’.

‘Throughout CH’s life he displayed a fierce commitment to France.  He cherished a belief in its greatness which contrasted with American contempt.  Roosevelt perceived France as a decadent imperial power which had lacked British resolution in 1940.  Entirely mistakenly, given the stormy relationship between De Gaulle and Churchill, the president thought the general a British puppet’. 

‘They believed the British enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations was driven by imperialistic rather than military considerations’.

‘After a period of relative intimacy between the US president and the British PM in 1941-42, when Roosevelt in some measure deferred to Churchill’s experience of war, thereafter their relationship became steadily more distant.  Mutual courtesies, affectionate rhetoric were sustained. But perceptions of national interest diverged with increasing explicitness.’

‘After three years in which he had done things no other man could, he was no longer vital to Britain’s salvation. If in 1940-41 he had been his nation’s deliverer, in 1942-43 the Americans owed him a greater debt than they recognised, for persuading their president to the Mediterranean strategy.  His strategic judgement had been superior to that of the American chiefs of staff.  Hereafter, however, his vision became increasingly clouded and the influence of his country waned.  For the rest of the war Churchill would loom much larger in the Grand Alliance as a personality than as a leader of its least powerful element’.

‘At a time when Stalin and Hitler were pitting some 200 [divisions] apiece against each other in the east, it is scarcely surprising that the Russians viewed their allies’ Mediterranean activities with contempt’.

‘Churchill wanted to ensure that the Americans persevered with his Mediterranean strategy, and were neither deflected towards the Pacific nor persuaded to hold back their forces for a later descent on France’.

‘His wise warnings about the future threat posed by the Soviet Union were insufficiently heeded. But this was in significant part because the Americans lost faith in his strategic judgement’.

‘There was always a paradox about Churchill as warlord.  On the one hand, he had a wonderful instinct for the fray, more highly developed than that of any of his service advisers.  Yet his genius for war was flawed by an enthusiasm or dashes, raids, skirmishes and diversions, sallies more appropriate – as officers who worked with him often remarked – to a Victorian Calvary subaltern than to the director of a vast industrial war effort’.

‘The Americans were uninterested in the operation (attack on the Dodecanese islands) and in the Turks as allies.  They believed that British aspirations in the Eastern Mediterranean were rooted in old fashioned imperialism rather than in contemporary strategy’.

‘recent research on the Nazi economy has shown that in the autumn of 1943 the Ruhr’s industries lay on the brink of collapse.  If Bomber Command had continued its assault, instead of switching targets eastwards, the consequences for Hitler’s war machine might have been dramatic… One of Harris’ major mistakes as director of the bomber offensive was failure to grasp the importance of repeating blows against damaged targets’ 

‘It seems extraordinary that some historians have characterised the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill as a friendship.  To be sure, the PM embraced the President in speech and correspondence as ‘my friend’.. In no aspect of his life and conduct as Britain’s leader did he display more iron self-control than in his wartime dealings with the Americans. ‘Every morning when I wake’. He once said, ‘my first thought is how I can please President Roosevelt’. But much of what FDR served up to Churchill between 1943 and 1945 was gall and wormwood’.

‘Churchill had been right, in 1942 and 1943, to force upon the Americans campaigns in the Mediterranean, when there was nowhere else they could credibly fight’.

‘In all probability, nothing the Western Allies could have done would have saved Poland from Stalin’s maw’.

‘Churchill’s grand vision of the war was superb.  Even acknowledging his delusions about the future of the British Empire, he articulated the hopes and ambitions of the Grand Alliance as no other man, including Roosevelt was capable of doing. His record as a warlord should be judged by what was done rather than what was said.  He indulged many flights of fancy, but insisted upon realisation of very few.  The 1943 Aegean adventure was an exception rather than a common-place.  The operation of the British war machine should not be assessed in isolation, but rather by comparison with those of Britain’s allies and enemies, and for that matter against the experience of every other conflict in history.  By that measure, Churchill presided over a system of military planning and political governance which was a model for all time’.

‘The key to understanding the wartime Anglo-American relationship is to strip aside the rhetoric of the two leaders and acknowledge that it rested, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest.  There was some genuine sentiment on Churchill’s side but none on Roosevelt’s’

‘In 1944-45 Churchill exercised much less influence upon events than in 1940-43.  But without him, his country would have seemed a mere exhausted victim of the conflict, rather than the protagonist which he was determined that Britain should be seen to remain until the end’.

‘For all their public expressions of mutual regard, it is hard to suppose that by this time Churchill or Roosevelt cherished much private affection for each other.  Their objectives were too far apart.  The President’s world vision was more enlightened than that of the PM, yet even less realistic.  He pinned his faith for the future upon the UN, the rise of Chiang Kai-Shek’s China and a working partnership between the US and USSR.  His motives were exalted.  Churchill’s impassioned commitment to freedom excluded the world’s black and brown races, as that of the president did not’.

‘The chasm was unbridgeable between Russian intentions and Western aspirations in Eastern Europe.  Nonetheless, an agreement had been reached about Poland, which if Stalin kept his word, might sustain some figleaf of democracy’.

‘Churchill’s writings, dating back to WWI, make plain that he thought air bombardment of civilians barbaric.  In the early part of WWII, when Germany had already ravaged half the cities of Europe and Britain had no other plausible options of attacking Hitler’s Reich, he suppressed his instincts and endorsed the bomber offensive.  That decision seems both inevitable and justifiable.  It is a gross misuse of language to identify area bombing as a ‘war crime’, as do some modern critics.  The policy was designed to hasten the defeat of Germany by destroying its industrial base, not wantonly to slaughter innocents.  Yet it remains a blot on the Allied conduct of the war that city attacks were allowed to continue into 1945, when huge forces of aircraft employed sophisticated technology against negligible defences and German industrial output could no longer influence outcomes.  Both the operational necessity to attack cities because the RAF could do nothing else, and the strategic purpose of such operations were gone’.

‘He [Brooke] provided a superb foil for the PM, preserving him from many misfortunes’.

‘The only charge against him that struck with the public, and lost him the general election in 1945, derived from his indifference to forging a new society’.