In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

War Without End

In a debate Churchill famously said to his opponent, "History will say that the right honorable gentleman was wrong in this matter. I know it will, because I shall write the history." For his entire adult life Churchill was obsessed with imposing his version of the past on posterity, and by far his most ambitious and successful such effort was his nearly two-million-word chronicle The Second World War -- a work whose red-and-black spines were a fixture in the dens of this republic for two generations. Although those spines often went uncracked, Churchill's interpretation of the war dominates the popular imagination even today, more than fifty years after the completion of the six-volume opus. Reynolds, a Cambridge historian, superbly disentangles the complex publication history of the work (it was, as they now say, a global "publishing event," netting its author as much as $50 million in today's money, largely tax free, thanks to his wily lawyers); unravels the elaborate series of constraints and purposes that shaped each volume's contents; and traces how and by whom each was written and researched. (Churchill directed a team of historians and officials who drafted and wrote much of the books themselves, and who even learned to mimic the master's Gibbonesque sonorities.) Most important, Reynolds carefully and engagingly separates what actually happened in 1939-1945 from Churchill's version of those events. Although he's no crude debunker, he dryly demonstrates that those six volumes are a tissue of embellishments, distortions, and exaggerations. Churchill assiduously selected and artfully edited documents to put himself in the best light; he manipulated his chronicle in deference to political and diplomatic allies, to enhance his domestic political position and to maintain state secrets (most significantly the Ultra intercepts); he distanced himself from or glossed over disasters in which he played an important part (the Dieppe raid, the rout on Crete, the area bombing campaign against Germany, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse) and asserted paternity over triumphs (Operation Overlord, say) in which his role was secondary. Written in the direst period of the Western-Soviet confrontation, the work almost completely ignored the Eastern Front, indisputably the decisive theater of the war; this was perhaps the volumes' most substantial twisting of history. But by Churchill's standards all this is of no matter, as Reynolds acknowledges. Edward R. Murrow, after all, in a 1951 review in this magazine of the fourth volume of the history, appreciated that "later historians who have access to full documentation may amend or reverse his conclusions," but they can't revise the past that he imperishably defined.

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