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.” But he looks happy.The experience restored his faith in himself and winning the war.He later wrote:As, in the shadows of a November evening, I for the first time led [my men] across the sopping fields which gave access to our trenches, while here and there the bright flashes of the guns or the occasional whistle of a random bullet accompanied our path, the conviction came into my mind with absolute assurance that the simple soldiers, and their regimental officers, armed with their cause, would by their virtues in the end retrieve the mistakes and ignorances of staffs and cabinets, of admirals, generals and politicians—including, no doubt, many of my own.But alas at what a needless cost! To how many slaughters, through what endless months of fortitude and privation, would these men, themselves already the survivors of many a bloody day, be made to plod before victory was won!Churchill’s service in the trenches served him well in both world wars because it enabled him to understand the views of ordinary soldiers and officers (much better than Sir Douglas Haig, who never went near the trenches if he could help it: he thought his nature too tender and that experiencing horrors would undermine his ability to take hard decisions).He returned to London exhilarated, eager for work—and to earn money to replace his ministerial salary writing articles for the Sunday Pictorial and the Times.After demeaning attempts to cling on, Asquith was finally ousted in December 1916 and replaced by Lloyd George, who began to do many of the things that should have been automatic from the beginning of the war.He wanted to bring Churchill back, but the Tories in his coalition would not hear of it.After a key meeting with LG behind the Speaker’s Chair in May 1917, Churchill became his unofficial adviser on the war, though holding no office.Thus “master and servant” were reunited and Churchill, chastened by his experiences and aware of the risks the prime minister was taking to talk to him at all, was for a time silent and almost servile.His position, however, was helped by his alliance with a new friend, Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian financier who was rapidly building up one of the most successful newspaper empires in Britain.They became intimate friends and the Beaverbrook press sang his praises.Clemmie disliked him even more than she did F.E.Smith, and thought his advice to her husband always wrong and often inflammatory.In my experience of Beaverbrook I found him shrewd and often wise, honest, reliable, and truthful.But many thought otherwise and agreed with Clemmie.At all events, by July 1917 Lloyd George felt strong enough to bring back Churchill and made him minister of munitions.This was a brilliant move, and Churchill rapidly made himself one of the most efficient departmental ministers in British history.It was a confused ministry which had grown up haphazardly during the war and was a maze of duplications, contradictions, and bureaucratic gang warfare.In a short time of fanatical hard work Churchill made it simple, logical, and efficient.He forged a close link with the front to ensure the troops got exactly the right weapons and ammunition they wanted, in the right quantities.He visited the front constantly, and Haig was so impressed by the improvement in supplies that he completely reversed his opinion of Churchill and let him use the Château Verchocq near Calais.Within a year, the British army was better supplied with weapons of their choice than either the French or the Germans.The vast quantities of heavy artillery, mobile cannon, and machine guns Churchill sent played a notable part in the slaughter inflicted on the German divisions, which attacked in March 1918, when for the first time in the war the relative casualty rate was decisively reversed.The German army began to bleed to death—the prime cause of their plea for an armistice in November 1918.Churchill was also effective in ensuring that American forces, arriving at the front in growing numbers from late 1917, never went short of munitions.There is a vignette of Churchill, after a day at the front, getting lost in his Rolls-Royce near Verchocq and shouting to his driver, “Well, it’s the most absolutely fucking thing in the whole of my life.” It is worth noting that Churchill, who disliked swearing in others and usually restrained himself, occasionally indulged when things went wrong.His secretary Elizabeth Layton once recorded: “He was in a very bad temper all this week, and every time I went to him he used a new and worse swear word.”Lloyd George also used Churchill in various key roles in the creation of a unified command with France in 1918.It was at his suggestion that the prime minister brought General Smuts into the war cabinet, in recognition of the enormous efforts the commonwealth had made to help Britain in the war.Soon after the armistice, LG held a general election, which he won with a huge majority for his coalition, Churchill defending Dundee again, as a Liberal (coalition).LG now felt strong enough to make full use of Churchill, bringing him into the cabinet and putting him in charge of both the army and the air force.His first job was to get the soldiers and sailors home as quickly as possible, and this he did with a brilliant scheme, entirely his own, whereby priorities were decided simply by length of service, wounds, and age.As he put it, “I let three out of four go and paid the fourth double to finish the job.” This worked, as did a surprisingly high proportion of his ideas.It would be hard to say whether he produced, in his lifetime, more superb ideas or phrases.His ideas, when they prospered, sometimes had a huge effect on the future.When they foundered, they left a desolating feeling of what might have been.He regarded Lenin’s Bolshevik coup of November 1917, his subsequent murder of the czar and his family, and the creation of a Communist state as one of the great crimes of history.He was determined to reverse it and sent troops and armies to Russia through Archangel.This intervention had begun before Churchill took over the War Office but he increased its scale and inflated it with his rhetoric, and had he been allowed he would have done more, and for longer.It did not seem to be working, and his colleagues insisted he pull out.Once again, he was “conspicuous,” and got all the blame.In a sense it was another Dardanelles.If it had succeeded, more than 20 million Russian lives would have been saved from starvation, murder, and death in the gulag.It is most unlikely that, with Bolshevism crushed, Mussolini could have come to power in Italy, or still less, Hitler in Germany [ Pobierz 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.” But he looks happy.The experience restored his faith in himself and winning the war.He later wrote:As, in the shadows of a November evening, I for the first time led [my men] across the sopping fields which gave access to our trenches, while here and there the bright flashes of the guns or the occasional whistle of a random bullet accompanied our path, the conviction came into my mind with absolute assurance that the simple soldiers, and their regimental officers, armed with their cause, would by their virtues in the end retrieve the mistakes and ignorances of staffs and cabinets, of admirals, generals and politicians—including, no doubt, many of my own.But alas at what a needless cost! To how many slaughters, through what endless months of fortitude and privation, would these men, themselves already the survivors of many a bloody day, be made to plod before victory was won!Churchill’s service in the trenches served him well in both world wars because it enabled him to understand the views of ordinary soldiers and officers (much better than Sir Douglas Haig, who never went near the trenches if he could help it: he thought his nature too tender and that experiencing horrors would undermine his ability to take hard decisions).He returned to London exhilarated, eager for work—and to earn money to replace his ministerial salary writing articles for the Sunday Pictorial and the Times.After demeaning attempts to cling on, Asquith was finally ousted in December 1916 and replaced by Lloyd George, who began to do many of the things that should have been automatic from the beginning of the war.He wanted to bring Churchill back, but the Tories in his coalition would not hear of it.After a key meeting with LG behind the Speaker’s Chair in May 1917, Churchill became his unofficial adviser on the war, though holding no office.Thus “master and servant” were reunited and Churchill, chastened by his experiences and aware of the risks the prime minister was taking to talk to him at all, was for a time silent and almost servile.His position, however, was helped by his alliance with a new friend, Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian financier who was rapidly building up one of the most successful newspaper empires in Britain.They became intimate friends and the Beaverbrook press sang his praises.Clemmie disliked him even more than she did F.E.Smith, and thought his advice to her husband always wrong and often inflammatory.In my experience of Beaverbrook I found him shrewd and often wise, honest, reliable, and truthful.But many thought otherwise and agreed with Clemmie.At all events, by July 1917 Lloyd George felt strong enough to bring back Churchill and made him minister of munitions.This was a brilliant move, and Churchill rapidly made himself one of the most efficient departmental ministers in British history.It was a confused ministry which had grown up haphazardly during the war and was a maze of duplications, contradictions, and bureaucratic gang warfare.In a short time of fanatical hard work Churchill made it simple, logical, and efficient.He forged a close link with the front to ensure the troops got exactly the right weapons and ammunition they wanted, in the right quantities.He visited the front constantly, and Haig was so impressed by the improvement in supplies that he completely reversed his opinion of Churchill and let him use the Château Verchocq near Calais.Within a year, the British army was better supplied with weapons of their choice than either the French or the Germans.The vast quantities of heavy artillery, mobile cannon, and machine guns Churchill sent played a notable part in the slaughter inflicted on the German divisions, which attacked in March 1918, when for the first time in the war the relative casualty rate was decisively reversed.The German army began to bleed to death—the prime cause of their plea for an armistice in November 1918.Churchill was also effective in ensuring that American forces, arriving at the front in growing numbers from late 1917, never went short of munitions.There is a vignette of Churchill, after a day at the front, getting lost in his Rolls-Royce near Verchocq and shouting to his driver, “Well, it’s the most absolutely fucking thing in the whole of my life.” It is worth noting that Churchill, who disliked swearing in others and usually restrained himself, occasionally indulged when things went wrong.His secretary Elizabeth Layton once recorded: “He was in a very bad temper all this week, and every time I went to him he used a new and worse swear word.”Lloyd George also used Churchill in various key roles in the creation of a unified command with France in 1918.It was at his suggestion that the prime minister brought General Smuts into the war cabinet, in recognition of the enormous efforts the commonwealth had made to help Britain in the war.Soon after the armistice, LG held a general election, which he won with a huge majority for his coalition, Churchill defending Dundee again, as a Liberal (coalition).LG now felt strong enough to make full use of Churchill, bringing him into the cabinet and putting him in charge of both the army and the air force.His first job was to get the soldiers and sailors home as quickly as possible, and this he did with a brilliant scheme, entirely his own, whereby priorities were decided simply by length of service, wounds, and age.As he put it, “I let three out of four go and paid the fourth double to finish the job.” This worked, as did a surprisingly high proportion of his ideas.It would be hard to say whether he produced, in his lifetime, more superb ideas or phrases.His ideas, when they prospered, sometimes had a huge effect on the future.When they foundered, they left a desolating feeling of what might have been.He regarded Lenin’s Bolshevik coup of November 1917, his subsequent murder of the czar and his family, and the creation of a Communist state as one of the great crimes of history.He was determined to reverse it and sent troops and armies to Russia through Archangel.This intervention had begun before Churchill took over the War Office but he increased its scale and inflated it with his rhetoric, and had he been allowed he would have done more, and for longer.It did not seem to be working, and his colleagues insisted he pull out.Once again, he was “conspicuous,” and got all the blame.In a sense it was another Dardanelles.If it had succeeded, more than 20 million Russian lives would have been saved from starvation, murder, and death in the gulag.It is most unlikely that, with Bolshevism crushed, Mussolini could have come to power in Italy, or still less, Hitler in Germany [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]