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Summary
Summary
Carlo D'Este's brilliant new biography examines Winston Churchill through the prism of his military service as both a soldier and a warlord: a descendant of Marlborough who, despite never having risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel, came eventually at age sixty-five to direct Britain's military campaigns as prime minister and defeated Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito for the democracies. Warlord is the definitive chronicle of Churchill's crucial role as one of the world's most renowned military leaders, from his early adventures on the North-West Frontier of colonial India and the Boer War through his extraordinary service in both World Wars.
Even though Churchill became one of the towering political leaders of the twentieth century, his childhood ambition was to be a soldier. Using extensive, untapped archival materials, D'Este reveals important and untold observations from Churchill's personal physician, as well as other colleagues and family members, in order to illuminate his character as never before. Warlord explores Churchill's strategies behind the major military campaigns of World War I and World War II--both his dazzling successes and disastrous failures--while also revealing his tumultuous relationships with his generals and other commanders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.
As riveting as the man it portrays, Warlord is a masterful, unsparing portrait of one of history's most fascinating and influential leaders during what was arguably the most crucial event in human history.
Author Notes
Carlo D'Este is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and a distinguished military historian. He lives in New Seabury, Massachusetts.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
D'Este (Patton: A Genius for War) is a master analyst of 20th-century military leadership, and this book may be his finest yet. Showing a remarkable knowledge of archival and printed sources, he tells the complex story of a statesman and warrior. As a child, Winston Churchill was "headstrong, highly opinionated, and virtually impossible to control." Those traits remained throughout a life he often regretted having spent in council chambers rather than on battlefields. His experiences as a young man in India, South Africa and the Sudan left him with both an abhorrence of war and a passion for soldiering. D'Este skillfully demonstrates how these traits shaped Churchill's persistent advocacy for preparedness and negotiation as means of averting war and his determination to see war through when deterrence failed. D'Este camouflages neither personal weaknesses nor questionable policies. But his expertise as a military historian provides contexts too often lacking in evaluating Churchill's roles in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, 1940's Battle of Britain and the D-Day invasion in 1944. Elegantly written, this tour de force belongs in every library addressing the 20th century. 16 pages of b&w photos, 9 maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* D'Este, a biographer of Patton and Eisenhower, has long detected an absence of objectivity about Churchill's military career. Here he astutely lauds Churchill's soldierly courage but questions how Churchill-the-politician acted as, in effect, an operational general. A list of battles he directly affected, from Antwerp in 1914 to Anzio in 1944, amounts to a record of military disaster, but D'Este weighs in the balance Churchill's attitudes toward waging war and the specific decisions he made in World War II that ultimately made him victorious. Churchill's abhorrence of inaction was evident in his youth, inducing him to seek out combat experiences he was fortunate to survive and eager to publicize. He also, D'Este argues, then formed a distrust of generals and admirals, a confidence in his own military intuition, and the flaw of dismissing military factors that bored him, such as logistics. Neither idolator nor revisionist, D'Este yields an ambivalent impression of Churchill that, while no denigration of his heroic leadership of Britain in 1940, underscores his paradoxes, such as a fascination with war's spectacle that vied with an unfeigned horror of its carnage. It is just such paradoxes that render him perennially intriguing to the reading public.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A look at the young women behind China's manufacturing boom. TOWARD the end of "Factory Girls," her engrossing account of the lives of young migrant workers in southern China, Leslie Chang describes receiving a gift. Min, a young woman who works at a handbag plant, presents Chang with an authentic Coach purse plucked fresh from the assembly line. It emerges that Min's dormitory-style bedroom is stuffed with high-end leatherwear. When the author proposes giving one of the handbags to the mother of Min's boyfriend, Min scoffs. "His mother lives on a farm," she says. "What's she going to do with a handbag?" The emergence of China's titanic manufacturing base has been chronicled in numerous books and articles in recent years, but Chang has elected to focus not on the broader market forces at play but on the individuals, most of them women, who leave their villages and seek their fortunes on the front lines of this economy. Since the 1970s, China has witnessed the largest migration in human history, Chang observes, "three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century." There are 130 million migrant workers in China today. A few decades ago, a rural peasant could expect to live and die on the same plot of land his family had farmed for generations. But the country's explosive economic growth has allowed the young and adventurous to trade the stifling predictability of village life for the excitement, opportunity and risk of the factory boomtown. A former China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Chang focuses on one boomtown in particular, Dongguan, a frenetic jumble of megafactories in Guangdong Province. The city produces garments of every description and 30 percent of the world's computer disk drives. One-third of all the shoes on the planet are produced in the province, and Chang spends time in a factory that manufactures Nike, Reebok and other brands. It has 70,000 employees, most of them women, and boasts its own movie theater, hospital and fire department. Dongguan is "a perverse expression of China at its most extreme," Chang suggests; it is polluted, chaotic and corrupt, but jostling also with a generation of strivers who are unashamed of their ambition and astonishingly indifferent to risk. New arrivals from the countryside can double or triple their income in a couple of weeks by taking a computer class or learning a little English. Switching jobs becomes a form of self-reinvention, and starting a new business is as easy as purchasing a new business card. To Chang, the factory girls seem to live in "a perpetual present." They have forsaken the Confucian bedrock of traditional Chinese culture for an improvised existence in which history and filial loyalty have been replaced by rapid upward mobility, dogged individualism and an obsessive pursuit of a more prosperous future. After revealing that her driver's license was purchased on the black market, one woman seems to voice the general ethos of the town when she says to Chang, of her abilities behind the wheel, "I know how to drive forward." With new job opportunities forever appearing and huge personnel turnover in any given factory, friendships are difficult to make and to maintain, and Chang details the loneliness and isolation of the migrant workers. Dongguan's laborers assemble cellphones, but they purchase them as well, and with their speed-dial archives of acquaintances, the phones become a sort of lifeline, the only way to keep track of the breakneck comings and goings of friends. If a worker's cellphone is stolen, as they often are, friends, boyfriends and mentors may be lost to her forever. "The easiest thing in the world," Chang remarks more than once, "was to lose touch with someone." People living their lives "on fast-forward" in this manner would seem to resist any kind of comprehensive portraiture by a reporter. But Chang perseveres, hanging around the factories, purchasing cellphones for some of the women she meets so that she can keep track of them, and eventually renting an apartment in Dongguan. While she relates the stories of numerous different women, she becomes closest with Min, who gave her the purse, and with Chunming, who left her home in Hunan Province in 1992 and has cycled through countless careers and relationships in the years since. (It is Chunming who can only drive forward.) Chang's extraordinary reportorial feat is the intimacy with which she presents the stories of these two women. Min and Chunming lack the reserve of some of their colleagues. They share their diary entries and their text messages, their romantic entanglements and their sometimes strained relationships with the families they left behind. The result is an exceptionally vivid and compassionate depiction of the day-to-day dramas, and the fears and aspirations, of the real people who are powering China's economic boom. BY delving so deeply into the lives of her subjects, Chang succeeds in exploring the degree to which China's factory girls are exploited - working grueling hours in sometimes poor conditions for meager wages with little job security - without allowing the book to degenerate into a diatribe. There is never any doubt that the factory owners in Hong Kong and Taiwan - and the consumers in American shopping malls - have the better end of the bargain. But for all the dislocation, isolation and vulnerability they experience, Chang makes clear that for the factory girls life in Dongguan is an adventure, and an affirmation of the sort of individualism that village life would never allow. "If it was an ugly world," Chang concludes, "at least it was their own." Patrick Radden Keefe is a fellow at the Century Foundation. His book "The Snakehead," about the Chinese human smuggler Sister Ping, will be published next year.
Choice Review
D'Este's superbly written and researched account of Churchill's life has a unique focus: the great Briton's war experiences, from a toddler playing with tin soldiers to a world leader fighting tyranny. D'Este has written many excellent works of military history and biography (e.g. World War II in the Mediterranean, CH, Dec'90, 28-2295), and he does not disappoint here. His ability to connect quotes, anecdotes, and narrative around his military theme and present a riveting account of Churchill's life is impressive. Although over half the book is about WW II, reflecting the author's expertise as much as his subject's life, some of the most interesting passages deal with Churchill's early years as a junior officer and war correspondent. D'Este's ability to craft the character of Churchill from a young age and trace his martial ethos through imperial service to Parliament and then to senior leadership makes this an innovative and convincing book. D'Este missed an opportunity by neglecting Churchill's later military roles, such as his 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech, or his second term as prime minister. Whether as a subaltern or supreme commander, Churchill was always an aggressive and innovative warrior. D'Este brilliantly tells his story anew. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. J. Tucci School of Advanced Air and Space Studies
Kirkus Review
A sprawling study of the lord of Overlordand Gallipoli and many other imperial campaigns. "War, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would play at," wrote Winston Churchill after the Battle of Omdurman, when British forces defeated an Islamist army still revered by the militant faithful. It was an ugly battle, but it would not be the ugliest Churchill witnessed. Military historian and former officer D'Este (Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life, 2002, etc.) finds in the half-American British leader a profound attachment to all things martialas a child, he writes, Churchill had a vast collection of toy soldiers and a keen sense of how to deploy thembut also a wariness of those who reveled too greatly in martial glories. As a young man, having "stumbled into adulthood from a stormy and rebellious childhood," Churchill felt he was an avatar of an ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, born for war and equipped to understand its every aspect as both scholar and practitioner. He fought on horseback in the Sudan, Egypt, India and South Africa before ascending, perhaps improbably, to the Admiralty. There he committed well-known tactical errors in planning the campaign at Gallipoli, and effectively punished himself by resigning to serve as an officer on the Western Front. In the years after World War I he emerged as a skillful military thinker determined not to repeat the largely political errors he had made, even though, during that time, he slashed the army budget, "unusual behavior indeed for a man who had played such an important role in the defense of Britain." Churchill did, however, advocate rearmament just in time for Hitler's rise and skillfully managed his share in the alliance that defeated him, even if voters sick of war turned him out of office as prime minister as soon as the conflict ended. Accomplished and comprehensive but overly long. John Keegan covered most of the bases in his 200-page Winston Churchill (2002), which nonspecialist readers will prefer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Over 500 books have been written--just in English--recounting the life and career of Winston Churchill, undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the 20th century. Thus one might ask whether we need yet another thick tome dedicated to his exploits. In this case, yes, we do! D'Este, a military historian of tremendous skills, has already crafted impressive and massive biographies of George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower. Now, he turns his manifold talents to examining the military career of Churchill, who considered himself above all a soldier first and a statesman second. Churchill never forgot his experiences either in the Boer War as a young soldier or in the decidedly unhappy Gallipoli Campaign in World War I, where his decisions as First Lord of the Admiralty led to the remarkable and deadly debacle in the Dardanelles. These wartime events shaped his strategic approach to the second and greatest of world wars, a conflict where his strengths and weaknesses as a leader would be clearly shown. D'Este has produced an outstanding work that should take its rightful place alongside the dozens of other studies of this most remarkable statesman. Highly recommended for all collections.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Warlord A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945 Chapter One Toy Soldiers The toy soldiers turned the current of my life. --Churchill He rather resembles a naughty, little sandy-haired bulldog, and seems backward except for complicated games with toy soldiers. --Clara Jerome, Churchill's grandmother It was only fitting that Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born "amid velvet muffs, fur coats and plumed hats" in the early morning hours of Saint Andrew's Day, November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the ancestral home of the Marlboroughs. According to his parents his arrival in a temporary cloakroom adjacent to the grand ballroom was unexpected. As the newest descendant of one of the icons of British history, Winston Churchill began life in a hurry, a trait he would never relinquish. His cousin and close friend Shane Leslie once noted that his birth seems to have been hastened by a gala event at Blenheim that night, the annual Saint Andrew's Ball, in which his mother, Jennie, participated with her customary ardor. "His previous and perhaps presumptuous arrival [his mother] alluded to as Winston's effort to make his first speec. . . . and historians will suppose that the band struck up martial music for his entry." In fact his birth was probably accelerated both by the fact that his mother had not only fallen during a shooting party six days earlier but had taken a rather jarring ride in a pony carriage that afternoon and was dancing enthusiastically when her labor pains began. His parents had intended that his birth take place in their London home in Mayfair, but, as he would throughout his long and tumultuous life, Winston Churchill could be counted upon to do the unexpected. An announcement in The Times three days later read: "On the 30th Nov, at Blenheim Palace, the Lady Randolph Churchill, prematurely, of a son." Not only is the declaration by his parents that he was born some two months prematurely highly dubious, but in that day it would have been a medical miracle had he even survived. Hardly anyone in the Churchill family's immediate circle of friends fell for the ruse. Churchill himself seems not to have believed it, once noting with evident amusement, "Although present on the occasion, I have no clear recollection of the events leading up to it." Churchill's parents have been unflatteringly described as "remote and tantalizingly glamorous. Randolph's glittering, bulging eyes and oversize whiskers hiding a small, intense face caused him to resemble a tenacious miniature Schnauzer, while darling 'Mummy' was another spectacle altogether." Indeed the descendants of the first and only notable Marlborough "were a thoroughly disreputable family, in debt, had scandalous relationships with women, and were incredibly rude to people, with only smatterings of respectability." Randolph and Jennie Churchill were exceptions; they captivated English political and social circles. "Neither Randolph nor Jennie needed to out-dazzle each other," noted Shane Leslie. "They both shone of their own light unlike the usual conjugal pairs who reflected each other like the moon and the sun." Few who met her ever forgot Churchill's mother, Jennie Jerome, a vivacious, raven-haired American. She was one of the best known and most fascinating young women of Victorian England, for her great beauty, joie de vivre, and marriage to one of Parliament's rising stars, and as a woman of considerable repute, with a legion of lovers. She was the product of a traditional silver-spoon, upper-class upbringing that included a finishing school in Paris, where she met her future husband. Jennie was one of three daughters of a formerly ultrawealthy New York financier, cofounder of the famed Jockey Club, and onetime owner of the New York Times , Leonard Jerome, who had lately fallen on hard times as a result of the stock market collapse of 1873. The Jerome sisters, Jennie, Leonie, and Clara, were once described by a contemporary wit as, respectively, "the Beautiful, the Witty and the Good." Jennie Jerome Churchill's admiring nephew Shane Leslie has described her as: "a magnificent type whose fierce yet faithful character [was] so utterly fearless towards those she loved, so scornful of those she disliked." As a parent Jennie left a great deal to be desired. She typified the upper-class women of her age for whom parenting did not rank high on their scale of priorities. Life in Victorian England as the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill was meant to be one of hedonistic pleasure, whether in the bedrooms of her lovers or the endless round of social events, parties, hunts, and attendance at high-profile racing events at Ascot and the annual regatta at Henley. Notes Shane Leslie, "Destiny had not slipped her into the world to play with Princes or to tread the Primrose path of politics. She had been furnished with some virile qualities of steel in her veins. . . . Men she could consider and treat as they generally treated women. There was the pantheres. . . . in her temper--otherwise it would have been impossible for her to fulfill her only real destiny and duty which was to breed Winston." Herbert Henry Asquith's second wife, Margot Tennant, did not know who Jennie was when she first encountered her in 1887 at a race meeting. "She had a forehead like a panther's and great wild eyes that looked through you. . . . Had Lady Randolph Churchill been like her face, she could have governed the world." Jennie was a woman of great contradictions who possessed far more than mere beauty. She disdained the Victorian dictates of humility and a woman's place in society. Her single-mindedness (which she passed to her two sons) was reflected in her commanding nature. After her boys were grown her causes ranged from founding a magazine to work aiding the wounded in South Africa during the Boer War. Warlord A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945 . Copyright © by Carlo D'Este. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945 by Carlo D'Este All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| A Note to the Reader | p. xi |
| Introduction: Born for War | p. xiii |
| Prologue: May 10, 1940 | p. 1 |
| Chapter 1 Toy Soldiers | p. 5 |
| Chapter 2 "A Barren and Unhappy Period of My Life" | p. 15 |
| Chapter 3 Sandhurst | p. 27 |
| Chapter 4 A Young Man on the Make: The Fourth Queen's Own Hussars | p. 39 |
| Chapter 5 The Jewel of Empire: India, 1896-1897 | p. 50 |
| Chapter 6 A Taste of War: The North-West Prontier, 1897 | p. 62 |
| Chapter 7 Soldier of Fortune | p. 75 |
| Chapter 8 Omdurman | p. 84 |
| Chapter 9 David Versus Goliath | p. 98 |
| Chapter 10 The Boer War | p. 108 |
| Chapter 11 The Great Escapade | p. 120 |
| Chapter 12 "The Red Gleam of War" | p. 134 |
| Chapter 13 Lessons Learned | p. 142 |
| Chapter 14 Star Bright | p. 150 |
| Chapter 15 The Odd Couple | p. 163 |
| Chapter 16 "Alarm Bells Throughout Europe" | p. 174 |
| Chapter 17 First Lord of the Admiralty | p. 185 |
| Chapter 18 Lighting the Bonfire | p. 198 |
| Chapter 19 The Architect of War | p. 212 |
| Chapter 20 Churchill's Private Army | p. 226 |
| Chapter 21 "Damn the Dardanelles! They Will be Our Grave." | p. 237 |
| Chapter 22 The Reckoning | p. 251 |
| Chapter 23 Penance | p. 263 |
| Chapter 24 "In Flanders Fields" | p. 277 |
| Chapter 25 "Winston's Folly" | p. 287 |
| Chapter 26 "A Hopelessly Obsolete, Old-Fashioned Warrior" | p. 299 |
| Chapter 27 The Shame of Munich | p. 312 |
| Chapter 28 "Bring Back Churchill" | p. 322 |
| Chapter 29 "Winston is Back" | p. 334 |
| Chapter 30 Warlord in Waiting | p. 344 |
| Chapter 31 The Norway Debacle | p. 353 |
| Chapter 32 The Loneliest Man in Britain | p. 367 |
| Chapter 33 "Action This Day" | p. 377 |
| Chapter 34 Minister of Defense | p. 388 |
| Chapter 35 The Central War Room | p. 400 |
| Chapter 36 Disaster in Flanders Fields | p. 411 |
| Chapter 37 Deliverance | p. 422 |
| Chapter 38 "Don't Give Way To Fear" | p. 432 |
| Chapter 39 "What a Summer to Waste on War" | p. 444 |
| Chapter 40 "Set Europe Ablaze" | p. 452 |
| Chapter 41 London Burning | p. 466 |
| Chapter 42 Wavell on the Hot Seat | p. 482 |
| Chapter 43 The President and the "Former Naval Person" | p. 497 |
| Chapter 44 Mediterranean Misadventures | p. 509 |
| Chapter 45 Disaster in Crete | p. 520 |
| Chapter 46 The Endless Desert War | p. 533 |
| Chapter 47 "Colonel Shrapnel" | p. 547 |
| Chapter 48 Chickens Roosting in the Far East | p. 557 |
| Chapter 49 The Quest for Generalship | p. 572 |
| Chapter 50 Getting it Right | p. 580 |
| Chapter 51 Alamein: The Turning Point | p. 595 |
| Chapter 52 Ike | p. 603 |
| Chapter 53 Torch and Casablanca | p. 608 |
| Chapter 54 Down the Garden Path | p. 615 |
| Chapter 55 Amid the Ruins of Carthage | p. 627 |
| Chapter 56 The Strategic Air Campaign | p. 639 |
| Chapter 57 Stranding the Whale | p. 649 |
| Chapter 58 Overlord At Last | p. 659 |
| Chapter 59 Summer of Discontent | p. 669 |
| Chapter 60 Victory | p. 683 |
| Postscript | p. 694 |
| Epilogue: The Last Farewell-a Look Back | p. 696 |
| Notes | p. 701 |
| Sources and Selected Bibliography | p. 795 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 809 |
| Index | p. 813 |
