The roar of the lion : the untold story of Churchill's World War II speeches /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:Toye, Richard, 1973- author.
Edition:First edition.
Imprint:Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.
Description:vi, 309 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/9625968
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9780199642526 (hbk.)
0199642524 (hbk.)
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Review by Choice Review

It can seem, as books on him proliferate, that no aspect of Churchill's life and career has been left unexamined. But imaginative historians will always find new questions to ask. Toye (Univ. of Exeter, UK), whose credits already include two fine books on Churchill (Churchill's Empire, CH, Dec'10, 48-2304; Lloyd George and Churchill, 2007), here engages with a well-known aspect of Churchill's wartime leadership--his great speeches--and asks how exactly they were received at the time. The author uses the usual sources--the contemporaneous opinion polls, private papers, diaries, and newspapers--but also enriches his study with archival sources underused by previous writers on Churchill. The most important are the BBC's listener surveys and the official reports from the Home Intelligence Division. Toye weaves all this skillfully together to provide the most nuanced assessment yet of the impact of Churchill's rhetoric. He concludes that the crucial contribution the speeches made was to provide the British public with both information and context, adding, "however great the phrases, uplift without content didn't work." These speeches inspired, yes, but also made the battered British feel they had solid grounds for endurance--a crucial contribution no one but Churchill could have made. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. R. A. Callahan emeritus, University of Delaware

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

In "CHURCHILL'S BOMB," Graham Farmelo recounts two related but distinct stories: the British role in the development of nuclear weapons from the 1920s through the 1950s and Winston Churchill's relationship with cutting-edge military science generally, and the Bomb specifically. At the outbreak of World War II, Britain's theoretical nuclear research was the most advanced in the world. A collection of unusually able Whitehall mandarins and scientific advisers and administrators nurtured the work of a handful of brilliant scientists, and Britain became the first government to approve the development of a nuclear weapon, in September 1941. Farmelo, the author of a biography of the English physicist Paul Dirac, tells this tale fluently, but it has been told before, most authoritatively by Margaret Gowing in her magisterial three-volume history on Britain and atomic energy. Farmelo, however, has also chosen to take up an unusual, and ultimately unfruitful, issue: He seeks to explain why Britain failed to maintain and more fully exploit its early nuclear lead, instead ceding the initiative to its wartime ally and rival, the United States. In pursuit of this line of inquiry, Farmelo brings a peripheral figure in Britain's nuclear program - Churchill - to the center of his story. This results in a somewhat clumsy amalgam of a book that distorts issues even as it illuminates significant flaws in Churchill's personality, policies and leadership. Churchill's role in Britain's wartime nuclear program was, as Farmelo acknowledges, "fitful." TYue, in his prewar journalism Churchill, following the fashion in popular commentary, periodically and fancifully discussed the possibility of atomic weapons - yet his speculations were inspired not by even a rudimentary grasp of nuclear physics but rather by the science fiction of H. G. Wells. To be sure, Prime Minister Churchill "went along with" (as Farmelo accurately puts it) the advice that emerged from a labyrinth of government committees studying the bomb project. But with his attention focused on a host of immediate catastrophes and struggles, he didn't involve himself in the recondite questions surrounding a long-term scientific endeavor. Churchill's contribution to Britain's nuclear program wasn't as important as Farmelo claims, but neither did he commit the fateful misstep discerned here. Farmelo builds his case entirely on a short note President Franklin Roosevelt sent to Churchill in October 1941, before America had entered the war. "It appears desirable," Roosevelt wrote, "that we should soon correspond or converse" about nuclear research "in order that any extended efforts may be coordinated or even jointly conducted." Farmelo elevates this vague message into what he characterizes as an offer of "close collaboration - quite possibly a partnership on equal terms - in developing the Bomb." By failing to "grab the offer with gusto," Farmelo says, Churchill squandered the opening for London to be a full and equal nuclear partner with Washington rather than the very junior partner it became. Farmelo's interpretation collapses under the realities of economic and military power. No matter what deal Churchill might have struck when the British had a temporary lead in nuclear research, once the United States entered the war, Britain was destined to become America's nuclear inferior. The building of the atomic bomb required the largest industrial enterprise in history, an effort, as the best British scientists recognized, wholly beyond the means of a besieged and virtually bankrupt Britain. Farmelo is correct, however, in his harsh assessment of the influence that Churchill and the physicist Frederick Lindemann, his longtime factotum, exercised on British military technology policy. Lindemann was almost universally disliked for his hauteur, his petty academic and administrative infighting, his prickliness and his malevolence. Although very smart, he repeatedly demonstrated his failure to grasp the cuttingedge advances in science. Ernest Rutherford judged him a "scientist manqué," and Robert Oppenheimer said simply: "That guy will never understand a thing." But thanks to his alliance with Churchill, Lindemann is probably the most influential scientist in the history of British politics. Churchill's contributions to the debate over the danger German rearmament posed and how best to thwart it, using arguments and figures he often took from Lindemann, were frequently counterproductive. In the mid- and late 1930s, Whitehall officials and the scientists they recruited methodically developed the technologies that would win the Battle of Britain - radar and an advanced fighter force - but Churchill and Lindemann kept inserting themselves unhelpfully in that work. Lindemann drove outstanding scientists from crucial committees; pushed his and Churchill's bizarre scheme for aerial mines; and denigrated the importance of radar, the one indispensable technology in Britain's air defense. Settling old scores and brooking no opposition by minds at least his equal, Lindemann neutralized the influence of Sir Henry Tizard, the scientific administrator who had nurtured radar and who the Nobel laureate G.P. Thomson rightly said was "the greatest genius at applying science to [military] tactics this country has ever known." And when the highly respected defense administrator Maurice Hankey confronted Churchill over Lindemann's malignant impact, Churchill fired Hankey. The evidence gathered by Farmelo supports Tizard's reluctant verdict that Churchill "was always pressing for the wrong developments against the advice of most scientists concerned." Tizard nevertheless generously concluded, "I think he is such a great man that it is a pity to exaggerate his doings in every direction." IN RECENT YEARS, Churchill's reputation as "a great man" has evolved as scholars re-examine his doings in many directions and find them wanting - or at least not as consistently and admirably right as he had memorialized them in his own multivolume histories. Throughout his career, Churchill made colossal misjudgments and played a central role in a series of disasters, including the Dardanelles fiasco in World War I, the ruinous intervention in the Russian Revolution, the failed Norway campaign at the outset of World War II, the nearcatastrophic "second Dunkirk" in western France in 1940, the Dieppe raid, the rout on Crete, the fall of Singapore and, most notably for current debates and concerns, the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. The one unassailable aspect of Churchill's career up to now has been the series of speeches he made in the darkest days of the war - the period from the German invasion of France in May 1940 until the end of that year. Historians and commentators have long declared that these speeches (recognizable in a few key phrases - "blood, toil, tears and sweat," "their finest hour," "so much owed by so many to so few") inspired the British to fight on despite disaster and the threat of invasion, and are therefore of worldhistorical significance. The military historian John Keegan asserted that Churchill's words "swayed the outcome of the invasion summer." But, as Richard Toye points out in "The Roar of the Lion," nearly all the evidence supporting the speeches' decisive impact on British morale is derived from retrospective accounts - and people's memories could easily have been shaped by the myth of 1940, a myth promulgated during the war by British propaganda, advanced after the war by Churchill and his supporters, then embraced by Britons who were no doubt flattered by the image it projected of them. Toye, a professor of history at the University of Exeter, demonstrates the unreliability of such retrospective accounts by citing people who remembered the impact of hearing Churchill on the wireless delivering his postDunkirk speech, with its vow that Britons "shall fight on the beaches. ..." Yet Churchill never did broadcast that speech; it was delivered, unrecorded, only to the House of Commons. (Churchill did make a phonograph recording of the speech - in 1949.) Indeed, the image of Churchill inspiring a nation huddled around creaking radios is fundamentally wrong - he delivered most of his speeches to Parliament. Rather than rely on what people remembered of Churchillian oratory, Toye has taken an obvious but novel approach: He has examined the contemporary reports and surveys on popular opinion by the Ministry of Information's Home Intelligence Division and by Mass-Observation, a social research organization; he also looks at letters and diaries written during the time. "It is hard to imagine," Toye writes, how the responses to the speeches "could have been better documented." What he has found deeply complicates, and in many cases utterly destroys, the popular image of 1940. Mass-Observation, for example, recorded that the response to what has probably become Churchill's most famous speech ("their finest hour") "was generally deemed satisfactory. People think that he did not say much, but that he said everything which could be said." Some thought Churchill had delivered the speech while drunk. The public reaction that Toye recounts makes sense when we remember that Churchill was far better known to his contemporaries than he is to us - and while they knew him to be courageous and in ways remarkably farsighted, they also were familiar with what many felt was his longstanding tendency to get carried away by his high-flown rhetoric. As the journalist J.L. Hodson noted in his diary, he wished Churchill were "less apt to think that by making a fine speech he is disposing of problems or actually winning the war - though a fine speech helps." Thus, Toye finds the speeches that had the greatest impact at the time were not the orations best known and beloved today, but the rather prosaic addresses in which Churchill announced positive and bellicose action - the British sinking of the Vichy French fleet and Britain's collaboration with the Soviets against Germany. Toye scrupulously avoids drawing overly broad inferences from the evidence he has uncovered. All he is ready to conclude is that Churchill's speeches were not the crucial factor that persuaded the British to fight on in 1940 against what seemed at the time grim odds. After all, at different stages of the war, the citizens of Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union fought on defiantly and - in their own terms - courageously, and never gave in to terrors meted out to them on a scale that, thankfully, the British never had to endure. It would seem that a noble cause and uplifting rhetoric may count for very little in the struggle for national survival. ? BENJAMIN SCHWARZ ÍS d visiting scholar at U.C.LA.'s Center for Social Theory and Comparative History.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 1, 2013]
Review by Library Journal Review

During a 50-plus-year political career, Winston Churchill gave a lot of speeches, most of which were captured in the eight-volume Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, with selections also available in such titles as Martin Gilbert's Churchill: The Power of Words. Toye (modern history, Univ. of Exeter; Lloyd George and Churchill) tackles Churchill's wartime speeches but from a more critical and analytical angle, which makes his book exceedingly important to scholars and others interested in Churchill and World War II. Toye goes beyond a simple assessment of each wartime speech and explores through diaries and other correspondence how Churchill's speeches were actually received by his listeners. Thus we find that the speeches were, at the time, often not as reassuring or convincing as we might think today. Surveys conducted by the British government after a Churchill speech revealed a short spike in morale, followed by a decline a few days later as the war continued unabated. The historical consensus has been that Churchill was a great speech giver whose words soothed his nation during the long war years. Toye shows that the truth is much more complicated. VERDICT This well-written and well-researched book is essential for all Churchill scholars as well as those interested in wartime Britain.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review


Review by New York Times Review


Review by Library Journal Review