WC exam questions topic 2 Flashcards
Does the evidence from the Mediterranean campaign suggest that Churchill was a great war leader? - YES
NEED TO DO
Does the evidence from the Mediterranean campaign suggest that Churchill was a great war leader? - NO
NEED TO DO
Was Churchill’s Mediterranean commitment a strategic error? - YES
The deployment of the bulk of GB’s land forces & a large proportion of her air & naval forces in the Med. diverted resources from other campaigns like the Battle of the Atlantic which was more crucial to GB’s survival & the bombing of Ger. which could obviously strike at Ger. much more directly.
The Italian. campaign held down less than 1/3 of the no. of troops the Germans had in France & not much more than 1/10 of the no. they had on the Eastern Front. Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia tied down more Ger. troops than the Allied forces in Italy.
Churchill’s preference for Italy over France, according to Kitchen, put nationalism before strategy: “Italy was a British show, whereas Overlord (D-Day) was run by the Americans”.
By June 1944 supremacy in the air & at sea had been achieved & sufficient US troops & supplies were available to ensure that the D Day landings could go ahead with fewer casualties than expected so Churchill was wrong to prioritise the Med even then.
Was Churchill’s Mediterranean commitment a strategic error? - NO
It was a brave & correct decision to send troops, tanks & aircraft to N Africa to resist the Italian offensive in 1940. Churchill correctly judged that the threat of a German invasion of GB had passed.
The garrison in Egypt had to be reinforced b/c an Axis victory there would have destroyed British power in the Middle East, denied GB vital oil supplies while giving them to the Gers. & threatened both India & the USSR.
The Med. strategy was worthwhile b/c the Italian forces were ill equipped, poorly led & weakly motivated. The successes of the Navy at Taranto & Cape Matapan & of the Army in Libya & East Africa with relatively small British forces showed this.
Deployment in the Med. was the only way GB could really hit back at Germany. after the defeat of France. British forces on their own were nowhere near strong enough to invade France & the RAF did not yet possess the heavy bombers to inflict serious damage on Ger. itself
How effectively did Churchill deal with his generals? - EFFECTIVELY
There were few disagreements about major decisions between C & Sir Alan Brooke, who succeeded Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1941. He supported C’s bold decision to send substantial land, sea & air forces to N Africa when the threat of an invasion of GB in 1940 had passed.
C’s faith in Montgomery was arguably justified b/c of his success in raising the morale of the 8th Army in N Africa in 1942, leading to the decisive victory in the 2nd battle of El Alamein in 1942 & the subsequent expulsion of the Gers. from N Africa in 1943.
The Brit generals, especially Brooke, agreed with C that the invasion of France should be postponed until 1944 b/c of the risk that a premature invasion would be a costly failure.
Despite all their differences, Brooke greatly admired Churchill for the way he inspired the Allied cause and for the way he bore the heavy burden of war leadership. In his diary he wrote, “I should not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth”.
How effectively did Churchill deal with his generals? - NOT EFFECTIVELY
C thought the politicians in WW1 had not intervened enough to keep the generals in line. He was critical of the generals in the pre-war period b/c he thought they were over-cautious & too inclined to use GB’s military weakness (especially the Army) as an excuse for not taking or even threatening military action to stop Hitler.
The generals thought that Churchill was living in the past; Wavell claimed, “Winston’s tactical ideas had to some extent crystallised at the South African War of 1899”. Remembering the disaster at Gallipoli in WW1, they saw him as a reckless adventurer & an amateur whose ideas were took no account of the realities seen by the professionals (i.e. themselves). The failure in Norway in 1940 reinforced this view.
Brooke wrote of C, ‘Winston had ten ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was.’ His diaries & the memoirs of other generals are full of complaints of C interfering with details which he should have left to the professionals.
During the French campaign in 1940 C ordered Lord Gort, the commander of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force), to keep trying to break through across the German lines to link with the main French army; knowing there was no chance of success in this, Gort defied this order & retreated to Dunkirk instead. Had C’s orders been followed, the BEF would have been lost.
How justified and successful was the Allied bombing of Germany? - Justified and successful
Between the evacuation of British troops from France in 1940 & their return in 1944, there was no way other than bombing in which GB could target Germany directly. The campaigns in the Atlantic & the Mediterranean diverted only small German forces.
It was politically necessary to show Stalin, who was furious that the opening of the “2nd front” (the invasion of France) was delayed until 1944, that GB was doing all it could to aid the USSR;
Speer, Hitler’s Armaments Minister, felt that the diversion of German resources from the Eastern Front to combat the bombing was on such a scale from 1943 onwards that it amounted to “a 2nd front”. 70% of German fighters & 75% of their 88-millimetre guns were deployed agt. the British & US bombers rather than the Red Army. The bombing also forced the Germans to switch aircraft production from bombers to fighters: by 1944 only 18% of new Ger. aircraft were bombers, greatly relieving the pressure on the Red Army.
How justified and successful was the Allied bombing of Germany? - Not justified and successful
8,325 British bombers were destroyed & 55,000 pilots killed.
The bombers used to bomb Germany would have been better employed, as the Navy & Army argued at the time, in protecting Atlantic convoys or British troops in North Africa. Overy argues that Churchill’s role was decisive in approving the priority given to bombing Germany & that Churchill was influenced by the political need to show Stalin he was “doing something” to hit Germany rather than genuinely military considerations.
Harris was obsessed with indiscriminate “area bombing” of German cities & resisted pressure for greater focus on military targets even when technological improvements made this possible. 40,000 German civilians died (many were burnt in death) in the bombing of Hamburg in 1943.
The bombing of Dresden had no military justification b/c the war was almost won by then (February 1945), there was no war industry there & up to 30,000 civilians were killed, many of them refugees fleeing the Red Army. The use of phosphorus caused 1,000s of women & children horrifically to burn to death. Even Churchill realised this had been a mistake.
Was Churchill a great war leader? - YES
Churchill was right on all the big issues: he was right about Hitler before the war, right to fight on in 1940-1 when all seemed lost, right to focus on gaining US support as the key to winning the war, right to support the USSR during the war but also right to see the danger she would pose after it.
His courage, energy, self-confidence & above all his rhetorical skill inspired GB at her moment of greatest peril in 1940. He raised morale by insisting that GB would never surrender (“we shall fight them on the beaches”) & that “this was their finest hour”.
Churchill made a brave & correct decision to send British forces to N Africa in 1940, judging correctly that the danger of invasion had passed & the Mediterranean was crucial. It also played to GB’s strengths, especially her naval superiority, & enabled her to gain much needed victories against relatively weak Axis forces.
Churchill was right to resist US & Soviet pressure for an invasion of France before 1944: with insufficient US troops available, the bulk of the landing force would have had to be British & the battle against the U-boats was not won until May 1943, nor air superiority until April 1944.
Was Churchill a great war leader? - NO
Churchill had many faults as a war leader: he was self-centred, impatient, often unfair in his judgement of his generals (especially, according to Corrigan, his sackings of Wavell & Auchinlek). He was exasperating to work for: as Roosevelt put it, “he has 100 ideas a day & only 4 of them are good”. He was saved from many strategic errors by Brooke, his brilliant Chief of the General Staff.
He made serious strategic errors: in the Norwegian campaign he insisted on ships being sent without air support, troops or equipment b/c he was so impatient to attack the Germans. He was lucky that the failure of this campaign, for which as First Lord of the Admiralty he was partly responsible, enabled him to become PM.
He tended to be over-influenced by political considerations: his desperation to keep France in the war in 1940 led to him ordering Gort to attack south, away from the coast, & only Gort’s disobedience of this order saved the BEF. Similarly, Dowding had to threaten to resign to force Churchill to let him hold the fighters back for the Battle of Britain.
Churchill’s decision to attack the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir caused the death of 1,300 French sailors, was railroaded through by Churchill despite the scepticism of both Cabinet colleagues & the Admiralty & seriously damaged Anglo-French relations.
Why did Churchill lose the general election in 1945 - Social change
Voters were grateful to Churchill for his war leadership but they did not see him as the man to lead the social reforms they wanted to see after the war.
The Beveridge Report which advocated benefits for the sick, widowed, retired, unemployed & families paid for by weekly National Insurance contributions was widely supported & (although Beveridge himself was a Liberal & the Tories promised to implement his Report) people trusted Labour more than Churchill & the Conservatives to deliver it b/c it was thought to be more in line with Labour’s Socialist ideas than Tory free enterprise. In fact Churchill said privately that “the government had gone further with Beveridge than he would have gone himself” & that Beveridge was “an awful windbag & a dreamer”. When he claimed in 1945 to support free school milk, the Welfare State & govt. intervention in the economy he was not believed b/c he had never supported these things before.
The unprecedented degree of govt. intervention in the economy which was necessary to win WW2 was seen as a success for Socialism & in many ways a model for the social changes people wanted to see after the war,
e.g. free school milk to improve the nutrition of working class children, Factory Acts to improve health & safety at work, the Wages Council Act which improved wages for the low paid & more generous welfare benefits following the abolition of the means test which humiliated poor people by forcing them to prove their need for benefits.
Even Churchill’s own daughter admitted that “Socialism as practised in the war never did anyone any harm & quite a lot of people good. The children of the country have never been so well-fed or healthy … this common sharing & sacrifice was one of the strongest bonds that united us. So why cannot this continue into peace?”
Why did Churchill lose the general election in 1945 - Other reasons
Despite Churchill’s personal opposition to the appeasement of Hitler, most Conservatives had supported it while Labour had opposed it so many blamed the Tories for it.
Clement Attlee’s Noble Tribute to Winston ChurchillChurchill made a big mistake in claiming that Labour would introduce a kind of Gestapo; this was absurd given the huge contribution to the war effort in the wartime coalition with Attlee as Deputy Prime Minister working v closely with Churchill & Bevin organising war production as Labour Secretary. Labour had always been clearer than the Tories in their opposition to Fascism.
Socialism was fashionable at that time (unlike today) b/c the USSR was widely admired as the main architect of Hitler’s defeat; even Churchill himself acknowledged this.
