Book Review: Churchill’s Shadow

When I posted my review of “The Fall of the Ottomans,” Bruce Cochrane recommended “Churchill’s Shadow” by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. I just finished it, and I would say it ranks among the top 10 history/biography books I’ve ever read (out of 150). Truly outstanding book!

Prior to reading this, I’d read “Winston’s War” (Max Knopf), “Churchill’s Folly” (Chrisopher Catherwood) and “Churchill & Orwell” (Thomas E. Ricks), as well as several histories of WWII in which Churchill is extensively featured. Churchill was a prolific writer and an assiduous curator of his brand. The sheer mass of Churchill haigiography in the English language would require several lifetimes to read. Wheatcroft offers an antidote to the Churchill mythmaking.

The writing is lively and erudite. No Churchill balloon goes unpunctured and no Churchill parade is unrained-upon. Wheatcroft makes effective use of letters from, to and about Churchill to color out the dates and places. Churchill courted, but did not like, FDR. He expressed more admiration for Stalin, who he believed—wrongly—that he understood.

Ultimately, the heroic Churchill is the one of soaring rhetoric during the bombing of London. But as a military advisor, Churchill was a disaster, not just at Gallipoli, but in various campaigns in WWII. Churchill opposed the Normandy invasion. As a politician, Churchill possessed a survivors versatility of conviction, having started out in parliament as a Tory, then switched to the Liberal party, only to return to the Tories. As a human being, Churchill was a man of eccentric taste, and an extraordinary capacity for alcohol at all times of the day and night. He chronically lived beyond his means. But he married once, and remained married to Clementine his entire life. He and his country would have been better served had he followed her advice more consistently.

As a leader of humanity, he was strong on white males and bigoted towards everyone else. He opposed giving women the right to vote right up until the day it was granted. He opposed independence for India. He was a firm believer in an indivisible and eternal British Empire, opposing Irish Home Rule.

This is much more than a biography. Several chapters cover Churchill’s legacies and myths since he died, and the egregious misapplication of the appeasement metaphor to justify all military interventions. As Wheatcroft shows, Churchill himself endorsed appeasement on some occasions, when offered from a position of strength.

I’ve cultivated a lifelong love for iconoclasm, and Wheatcroft shatters several churchfulls of icons here. The snarky asides are witty and abundant. As an ebook, the text clocks in at 544 pages before the acknowledgements, and I was genuinely sorry to see it end. I strongly recommend this book.