Winston Churchill: Defender of Democracy

Page 5 of 7

• 1. A statesman transformed
• 2. Threat of invasion
• 3. Unfailingly brave
• 4. Man of the people
• 5. Grand alliance
• 6. Achievements of war
• 7. Find out more
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Grand alliance

In foreign affairs, his greatest achievement was to engage the sympathy of the United States, without whose material help - and, better, military alliance - Britain, he well understood, had no chance of winning. America came safely on board in December 1941. A more unexpected ally had already been found in the form of the Soviet Union: an uncomfortable ally, indeed - but given Britain's grim situation in mid-1941, Churchill prudently bowed to necessity. Once this 'grand alliance' was formed, Churchill became both the pivot and mainspring of it. Stalin and Roosevelt, left to themselves, would never have come together to decide grand strategy and to try to sort out problems. It was Churchill who did the journeying (40,000 miles during the war) to keep the 'big three' together; it was he who invented the 'summit' meetings of national leaders (those at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam are the most famous) - and these have remained a feature of international affairs ever since.

'... military men could not be allowed to use their armed forces free from ultimate civilian political control.'

The fourth dimension of Churchill's war leadership, the one that continues to excite more debate than the others, concerned the military. Constitutional principle, joined with his experience of the First World War, convinced him that military men could not be allowed to use their armed forces free from ultimate civilian political control. Britain's military chiefs for their part sought no such freedom; but they did expect freedom to decide by themselves, with the advice of their own staffs and experts, what was militarily possible and what was not. Churchill, a soldier himself in earlier life and with naval experience, liked to press his own ideas upon the army and navy staffs and insisted on them being exhaustively considered. This wasted much time and temper. The memoirs of the army Chief of Staff, Lord Alanbrooke, are only the most choleric of many accounts of the rows that punctuated the army's relations with its ultimate master.

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Published: 2002-06-14