Winston Churchill's War Leadership by Sir Martin Gilbert Page A

still at the Admiralty, Churchill had written to a War Cabinet colleague with regard to his own much postponed plan to drop aerial mines into the River Rhine to disrupt German military barge traffic: “The offensive is three or four times as hard as passively enduring from day to day. It therefore requires all possible help in early stages. Nothing is easier than to smother it in the cradle. Yet here perhaps lies safety.” That same month Churchill wrote to the First Sea Lord: “An absolute defensive is for weaker forces,” and he added: “I could never be responsible for a naval strategy which excluded the offensive principle.” He was delighted—“I purred like six cats,” he later recalled—when General Wavell sent him a plan for an attack in the Western Desert in November 1940: “At long last we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive,” he told General Ismay, and added: “Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.”
    Anything that smacked of passivity on the part of his army commanders incurred Churchill’s wrath. Learning at the beginning of November 1941 that nothing “large” was being planned against the German and Italian forces in the Western Desert by Wavell’s successor, Churchill wrote to his former Boer War adversary, General Smuts, then a respected voice in Allied military circles: “I dread the idea of this long delay, when, as we know for certain, the enemy is hard pressed for supplies and would be greatly embarrassed by making exertions.” He continued: “In war one cannot wait to have everything perfect, but must fight in relation to the enemy’s strength and plight. I am appalled at the proposal to remain passive all this time, when the golden opportunity may be lost.” Later, Churchill was to summarize this feeling in a terse comment: “The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter—‘Paralysis.’”
    Churchill’s military advisers did not always see his keenness for action as a virtue. In September 1942, during the North African campaign, General Sir Alan Brooke noted in his diary: “It is a regular disease that he suffers from, this frightful impatience to get an attack launched.” But it was an essential feature of his war leadership, and one that enabled him to drive forward the whole machinery of war-making.
    In both the military and political spheres, Churchill dreaded prevarication when the need for decisive action seemed to him imperative. In May 1944, confronted by an Anglo-American dispute over how to agree on the role of the Soviet Union in Romania and Greece, he feared that only Stalin would be the beneficiary of Anglo-American hesitations. When Roosevelt suggested the establishment of “consultative machinery” between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, Churchill replied: “I am much concerned to receive your message. Action is paralyzed if everybody is to consult everybody else about everything before it is taken. Events will outstrip the changing situations in these Balkan regions. Somebody must have the power to plan and act.”
    Churchill had always been a believer in the power of the written word—from the time when, as a schoolboy, he would write his mother long letters setting out his requests and point of view and defending his actions. Throughout his political life he was convinced that if he set out an argument clearly, on paper, he might have a chance to influence even the most obdurate of adversaries. These appeals, which are found in the archives of all his political contemporaries from 1900 on, were not always successful, but he believed that the effort should be made and that there should be on record clear, written evidence that, during the war, no stone had been left unturned. One example was his appeal to the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, urging him, on 16 May 1940, not to commit Italy as an active ally of