Winston Churchill

At War and Thinking of War before 1939

B.J.C. McKercher, Antoine Capet, B.J.C. McKercher, Antoine Capet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Although remembered and even lauded in the public mind as the British prime minister during the Second World War who played a major role in Allied victory over the Axis Powers and Japan, Winston Churchill had a life and political career before 1939 conditioned by fighting other wars and, in peacetime, thinking about war. While historians debate his achievements and failures between 1939 and 1945, a less explored dimension is Churchill's earlier connexion with war and warfare. This book explores Churchill's earlier experience in fighting wars as a soldier and politician.

1 At war on the Nile

What Winston Churchill learned from the River War¹

James W. Muller

No one can read Winston Churchill’s autobiography, My Early Life,² published in 1930 during a lull in his political fortunes, without marvelling at the adventures of his youth. He recounts several near brushes with death: his first encounters were in Ireland. On the day that he was to see a pantomime, the theatre burned down (MEL 15–16). Then, thrown off his donkey during a visit to a country house, Churchill suffered a concussion (16). Back in England, he avers that he “fell into a low state of health” at his first school – “St. James’s School”, which was actually named St. George’s. In truth, his parents withdrew him after discovering that his headmaster had beaten him severely. At his next school, near Brighton, Churchill “very nearly died from an attack of double pneumonia”, recovering only slowly (27). Soon after he left his third school at Harrow, his brother and a cousin cornered him at his aunt’s estate on opposite ends of a bridge spanning a ravine called a chine. Rather than being caught in the game of tag, Churchill jumped off the bridge, reaching out for the branches of a fir tree in a forlorn hope to break his fall. Tumbling 29 feet into the chine, he broke his thigh and ruptured his kidney. He lay unconscious for three days afterwards and “for a year looked at life round a corner” (44). The next summer, on a visit to Switzerland, he and his brother rowed out into the lake at Lausanne. When they jumped off their boat to swim, the wind came up, blowing the boat farther and farther away. Churchill swam for his life and just barely managed to catch it. Then he rowed back and rescued his brother, but not until he had seen “Death as near as I believe I have ever seen him … . swimming in the water at our side” (51).

Many a young man who had experienced such close shaves would have been loath to put himself in harm’s way again – but not Churchill. His attachment as a schoolboy to his growing collection of toy soldiers, his ambition to win glory in battle like his ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, and his father’s conclusion that he lacked sufficient intelligence for a legal career had propelled him into the army class at Harrow and thence to the Royal Military College. As a cadet at Sandhurst, he rode horses and “bit the tan” – which is to say he fell off onto the riding-course – “on numerous occasions”. Undaunted, he always climbed gamely back onto his horse. Before long, he and his friends had organised “a steeplechase in the park of a friendly grandee, and bucketted gaily about the countryside” (59). Then, as a cavalry subaltern in the Fourth Hussars, he rode for half a year on a bare-backed horse, while enlisted men who had the same training grinned at his mishaps (77). He pondered his aptitude for the military life he had chosen to gain fame and chart a path toward politics, wondering how it would be for him “to hear the whistle of bullets all around and to play at hazard from moment to moment with death and wounds” (90).

In 1895, in a world so peaceable that British officers were hard put to find any war to fight, Churchill arranged “a private rehearsal, a secluded trial trip, in order to make sure that the ordeal was one not unsuited to my temperament” (90). The Spaniards were trying to hold onto their North American colony of Cuba, and he pulled a few diplomatic strings to accompany the general charged with suppressing an insurrection by nationalist guerrillas. In his autobiography, he explains what he was looking for:

that lure of youth – adventure for adventure’s sake. You might call it tomfoolery. To travel thousands of miles with money one could ill afford, and get up at four o’clock in the morning in the hope of getting into a scrape in the company of perfect strangers, is certainly hardly a rational proceeding.

(94)

For the first few days, he saw no sign of war as he rode through the country with Spanish troops. But on or about his 21st birthday, he got his wish: guerrillas attacked the column. Churchill was under fire and afterwards “began to take a more thoughtful view of our enterprise” (98). He did not think Spain would be able to defeat the guerrillas – an army kept up across the ocean was like “a dumb-bell held at arm’s length” (96) – but he saw how attached the Spanish were to their “Pearl of the Antilles” (91). When an officer explained that they were “fighting to preserve the integrity of our country”, Churchill realised for the first time that the Spanish felt about Cuba just as the British did about Ireland (96). He unfolded these discoveries to readers of the newspaper despatches that he sent to London to put his name before the public and help defray the expenses of his trip.³

In the following year Churchill’s regiment was sent to India for a tour of duty of 12 to 14 years (MEL 103). After the long sea voyage east, he had a mishap when he reached dry land at Bombay harbour. As he grabbed an iron ring on the sea-wall to help him step onto the stairway to the top of the wall, the skiff that had carried him from ship to shore fell away with the waves, yanking his right shoulder out of its socket. For the rest of his life, his dislocated shoulder gave him trouble (115–16). In India, the most important part of the British Empire after the loss of American colonies in their Revolutionary War, informal rule by the royally chartered British East India Company had given way to British imperium several decades earlier. A British viceroy ruled India with assistance from British administrators and the collaboration of native princes and, in time, Queen Victoria was styled Empress of India. Aside from its rich trade, India was Britain’s foothold in South Asia to resist Russian expansion southward through the Himalayas in what came to be called the “Great Game”. For Britain, the subcontinent had become its “jewel in the Crown”.

But for all of its riches, geopolitical significance, and exotic culture, India struck Churchill as a dull provincial backwater. In a hurry to win political office and fame, he never meant to spend 12 to 14 years there. He chafed at being away from the seat of the Empire and took his first opportunity for a leisurely return visit to Britain (134–35). In his idleness at Bangalore, three pastimes distracted him from routine military duty – growing roses, collecting butterflies, and wooing the daughter of the British Resident at Hyderabad – and he found two consolations: reading the great books he had never had the chance to study at a university and playing polo. He also had one overriding goal: to make a name for himself as a brave officer, which he hoped to do by active service on the Indian frontier, where contumacious tribesmen sometimes rose in rebellion, clashing with British troops pushing out the boundaries of Empire.

Not in India but in England, Churchill found the key to joining the Malakand Field Force commanded by Sir Bindon Blood. When he met the general at a house party before his regiment departed for India, he extracted from him a “promise that if ever he commanded another expedition on the Indian frontier, he would let me come with him” (107). Churchill was back in England at the Goodwood horse races when he got word of a rising on the North-West Frontier. Reminding the general of his promise (136), he hastened to return to India. It took time to secure leave from his regiment in Bangalore to go to the Malakand country and for the general to find room on his staff. In the meantime, Churchill arranged to write despatches about the fighting for the Daily Telegraph in London and sign on as a correspondent for Rudyard Kipling’s newspaper in India’s north-west, the Pioneer Mail of Allahabad.

Eventually he succeeded in reaching the Malakand Field Force, which had already begun its operations in the wild borderlands now in north-west Pakistan, near Afghanistan, and secured a place on Blood’s staff. Conspicuously mounted on a grey pony, he wrote to his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, after a day of fierce fighting that he had ridden “all along the skirmish line where everyone else was lying down for cover. Foolish perhaps but I play for high stakes … ” (WSC I 359). Having put himself in danger, he believed in his star, admitting to her that he was “so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending” as death in a faraway frontier skirmish (WSC I 363). After hearing that he had been mentioned in despatches by Blood, who attested that the young officer had “made himself useful at a critical moment” (WSC I 362), Churchill wrote his brother, Jack, that “there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation of personal courage” (WSC I 363). But Churchill, eager for an audience in England, was disappointed that his mother had arranged for his Daily Telegraph despatches to be published anonymously.⁴ As soon as the fighting was over, he returned to his bungalow in Bangalore, working at least five hours every day to turn his despatches about the campaign into a book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War,⁵ which he completed in two months. The book was published in March 1898.

After helping to subdue the Pathans of the Himalayas, Churchill sought to join the march against the Dervish Empire of the Sudan. By 1885, shortly after Britain had taken responsibility for Egypt’s government in suppressing the nationalist rebellion led by Ibn Arabi, the Dervishes had proclaimed an Islamic regime in the Sudan, captured Khartoum, killed Britain’s envoy Charles Gordon, and pushed the Egyptians out of the country. More than 13 years later, an Anglo-Egyptian army led by British General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, having advanced slowly upriver in a two-year campaign to reclaim the Sudan, reached Atbara where, in April 1898, they fought the second-largest battle of the war on their way to Khartoum.

The revolt of the Sudanese Dervishes was an early instance of political Islam, a sort of Moslem revivalism, in collision with Western modernity. They called themselves the Ansar, helpers or companions of the Prophet. The British called them “Dervishes”: the word refers to a religious mendicant who has taken vows of poverty and austerity. To understand these rebels, one must not think of the whirling Dervishes, who try to free their souls from their earthly envelope in a graceful, dreamy dance that mimics the movement of the heavenly bodies. They were rougher characters – military monks attuned to fierce, martial songs, not to the gentle, ethereal music of the spheres. These fighting Dervishes were Moslems prepared to march to their death; yet they might also free their souls from their earthly envelope if they died fighting for God. Young Churchill, newly steeped in the rationalism of books he had read in India (MEL 129–32), was more worldly in every way, but he had to move heaven and earth to get to the Sudan; and without those efforts, his next book, The River War,⁶ would never have been written.

Churchill explains in his autobiography that although he was only a young fellow “deeply anxious to share” in an exciting campaign, he began to attract the attention of “ill-informed and ill-disposed people” (MEL 176).⁷ Considering him a “Medal-hunter” and a “Self-advertiser”, their reasoning ran like this:

Who the devil is this fellow? How has he managed to get to these different campaigns? Why should he write for the papers and serve as an officer at the same time? Why should a subaltern praise or criticise his senior officers? Why should Generals show him favour? How does he get so much leave from his regiment?

Churchill found it “melancholy to be forced to record these less amiable aspects of human nature”, but he experienced resistance to joining the Anglo-Egyptian expedition against the Dervishes. The difficulty arose in “the highest quarter”: although recommended by the War Office, Kitchener, the Sirdar or commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Egyptian army, refused him (MEL 177). Churchill went to London on leave, hoping to reverse the decision. Since the death of his father in 1895, Winston’s mother had devoted herself to advancing her son’s career.⁸ She wrote to Kitchener to request that he find a place for him, but to no avail: he considered other officers more deserving than Churchill. By then it was June 1898. The combined British and Egyptian force had already reached “the final phase” of operations (MEL 176), and it was almost too late for Churchill to join the advance on Khartoum before its climax.

But a book does not always disappear like a pebble thrown into the waves, and it was now his good fortune to be rescued by “a quite unexpected event” (178). The prime minister, Lord Salisbury, whose epigram on frontier wars had graced the title page of The Malakand Field Force (MFF iii), had “happened to read” Churchill’s book and wanted to meet him (MEL 178). When Salisbury received Churchill in his office in mid-July, he told him that his book had dispelled misunderstandings about the war on the Indian border: in fact, it had given him “a truer picture of the kind of fighting that has been going on in these frontier valleys” than any official document he had been obliged to read. He remarked how much the young Churchill reminded him of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill – whom he had not always welcomed as his colleague – and offered to help in any way he could (179). A few days later Churchill decided to ask, through an intermediary, whether the prime minister would be willing to send a telegram to Kitchener on his behalf. The premier promptly sent a telegram, but again the Sirdar replied in the negative.

A last effort of perseverance allowed Churchill his share “in the stirring episodes of the Battle of Omdurman” (181). He learned that Sir Evelyn Wood, the adjutant-general, was upset at Kitchener’s indifference to War Office recommendations of officers for the expeditionary force. When a friendly go-between, the “celebrated London hostess” Lady Jeune (182),⁹ told Wood that Kitchener had turned down an appeal from the prime minister, the adjutant-general decided to “stand up for his prerogatives”. Although the Egyptian Army, under Kitchener’s sole control, made up much the greater part of the force, the War Office was responsible for the composition of the small British contingent attached to it. Churchill promptly received appointment as a “supernumerary Lieutenant” to the Twenty-first Lancers and directions to proceed to headquarters in Cairo at his own expense. Unchastened by criticism of officers who combined military and journalistic duties, and “feeling the force of Napoleon’s maxim that ‘war should support war’”, he arranged with his friend Oliver Borthwick to write letters on the campaign. He would be paid £15 for each letter published in the Morning Post, the London newspaper owned by young Borthwick’s father, Lord Glenesk (MEL 182; see also RW I ix). Then Churchill caught a train for Marseilles, whence his ship left for Alexandria.

Never eager to have his campaign scrutinised by reporters, the Sirdar shared the professional view that army officers should not double as war correspondents. Churchill, with his Indian despatches and book, was the most notorious offender.¹⁰ Lady Jeune, when she joined the Churchills’ campaign to persuade the general to add the young officer to his army, had addressed the sore point in a telegram: “Hope you will take Churchill. Guarantee he won[’]t write.”¹¹ She had asked for and received Churchill’s promise that if Kitchener allowed him to join the Egyptian cavalry in the campaign, he would forbear from writing about it – which would have meant no despatches, and probably no book either. Eager for income from his writing and even more eager for fame, Churchill must hardly have liked this condition. When the Sirdar was unmoved by Jeune and Churchill was appointed to the English contingent instead, Churchill made haste to inform her that he considered himself released from his undertaking.¹²

He respected it only insofar as to devise a transparent cover for his Morning Post letters,¹³ which were written as if they were private correspondence with a friend, who was then supposed to have leaked them to the newspaper without Churchill’s permission and against his express wishes. “If you look in the Morning Post”, he wrote to his Indian Army friend, Captain Aylmer Haldane, “it is possible that you will see that one of my friends has committed and continues to commit an unpardonable breach of confidence by publishing letters of mine”; he asked Haldane not to “give away the pious fraud”.¹⁴ When the newspaper published his letters a few weeks later,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Winston Churchill: At War and Thinking of War before 1939
• 1. At war on the Nile: What Winston Churchill learned from the River War
• 2. “A dangerous, if not malignant design”: Winston Churchill and Germany’s naval challenge before the First World War
• 3. “By God, I will make them fight!”: Winston Churchill and Britain’s decision for war in 1914
• 4. Churchill’s downfall in 1915: The British press and the Dardanelles campaign
• 5. What Churchill and De Gaulle learned from the Great War
• 6. The limitations of the politician-historian: Winston Churchill, rearmament, appeasement, and the origins of the Second World War
• 7. Winston Churchill and the golden age of journalism
• 8. Winston Churchill, Islam and the Middle East 1
• Bibliography
• Index