History Was His Profession
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Winston Churchill was a first-rate historian. That his style of historical writing was rejected by academic historians in his century does nothing to diminish the quality of his work. He had a tremendous empathy for the past, which, coupled with his sense of the English language, brought forth works of great majesty that still stir a popular audience
His histories are mostly read today for biographical reasons – as the writings of a very great man – yet like Parkman, Gibbon, Motley, or Grote, even his driest works have literary merit. His histories of the two World Wars are essential reading on the subjects, and there is a scholarly heft and descriptive elegance to his lives of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the first Duke of Marlborough. Has any great politician, moreover, written a book as charming as “My Early Life: A Roving Commission”? It, along with his collection of portraits, “Great Contemporaries,” should be on the shelf of all reading men.
While the library of Churchilliana is immense and increasing, Churchill the Historian has been neglected in comparison with Soldier Churchill, Statesman Churchill, Imperial Churchill, even Churchill the Failure. Into that breach comes David Reynolds with “In Command of History” (Random House, 631 pages, $35), which details Churchill’s composition of his World War II memoirs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is a marvelous piece of scholarship.
Churchill’s “Second World War” is the most influential work of historical scholarship ever written. The sixvolume memoirs functioned as the official British history of World War II and essentially settled the popular narrative of the war. He emphasized the relatively minor campaigning in North Africa and almost completely neglected Stalingrad, where the war actually turned for the Allies. He viewed the war as culminating in the invasion of Normandy rather than in the battles of the eastern front.These are still the popular perceptions. As J.H. Plumb pointed out in 1969: “The phases of the war are the phases into which he divided it. And this will deeply influence, indeed has already deeply influenced, subsequent historians. They move down the broad avenues which he drove through war’s confusion and complexity.” (Only Caesar with the Gallic Wars also managed the feat of making the history and then writing it.)
It was obvious to his colleagues – even before he became prime minister – that Churchill would write up his experience of the War Cabinet. Many of the minutes he produced were with an eye on the future book. After the war he haggled with the Labour government over his right to quote from official papers, and his agents arranged one of the great profitable (and mostly tax-free) publishing deals. With all settled, Churchill set to work with a large team of helpers. Researchers pulled the material together on the lines that Churchill laid out, he then added the flourishes and rhetoric, which were further honed through numerous and costly page proofs. It was also all heavily fact-checked – often by the very participants themselves.
Mr. Reynolds details the huge and often hasty efforts and also how the themes – celebratory or apologetic, defensive or critical – were settled on. Churchill had an eye on winning the 1950 British election and was very concerned to maintain the transatlantic relationship. Mr. Reynolds makes clear how such sentiments affected and adjusted the contents of the volumes as they were being written. This daylight let in on magic does nothing but increase my admiration for Churchill. He was apotheosized after the war, but the flawed, energetic, ever-working, and ever-curious man is far more interesting. And he could write.
It is a nice coincidence that the Free Press has just reissued Churchill’s account of World War I – “The World Crisis” (857 pages, $19 paper) – to accompany the publication of Martin Gilbert’s essential study of Churchill the American (“Churchill and America,” 501 pages, $30). The descriptive energy of “The World Crisis” is striking – particularly in the battle narratives – even after 75 years. Here is Churchill on the German commander at the crisis of the Battle of the Marne:
Everything now converged upon Moltke. Who was Moltke? He was the shadow of a great name; he was the nephew of the Old Field Marshal and had been his aide-de-camp. He was an ordinary man, rather a courtier; a man about the Palace agreeable to the Emperor in the palmy days of peace. The sort of man who does not make too much trouble with a Sovereign, who knows how to suppress his own personality – what there is of it; a good, harmless, respectable, ordinary man. And on to this ill-fated being crashes the brutal, remorseless, centripetal impingement of tides and impulsions under which the greatest captains might have blanched!
There is hardly any doubt what he should have done. A simple message to all the German armies to be imparted to every division, ‘If you cannot advance, hold on, dig in, yield not a scrap of conquered territory; vestigial nulla retrorsum,’ might well have stabilized the situation. At this time, however, only the British Army knew (from the Boer War) the power of modern weapons on the defensive. The French were just enjoying their first exultant experience of it. None of the military men on the other side yet knew that as a matter of fact a 30-mile gap in a front of 200 is only a trap for the attackers who enter into it. Almost instantly it becomes not a victory but a dangerous salient, a bulge subject to crossfire and counter-attack from both flanks, the worst place in the world for a further offensive.
It is charming, exciting, and accurate; there are such delights on every page of the two giant “war-memoirs.” Winston Churchill for six decades earned his keep by the pen. He earned his ever-lasting fame another way, but it is well to remember his profession.