Winston Churchill: Greatest Briton Ever?

Gilbert took on the role of official historian of Churchill in 1968 after Churchill’s son Randolph died. Randolph began the official biography of his father, leading a team of researchers, which included Gilbert beginning in 1962. Randolph and his team wrote two volumes of the biography, and they were disjointed and not very well written. I once asked Gilbert why Randolph’s volumes were so lacking, and he said that Randolph had great ideas but wasn’t disciplined in his execution. Gilbert was, to say the least, more disciplined, and he executed Randolph’s plan very well.



Gilbert took over the effort and completed the final six volumes of the biography, completely transforming the work and greatly elevating the quality. These six books chronicled Churchill’s life in great, well-written detail, offering extensive information in a flowing narrative. This was no mean feat given Churchill’s long and epic life, during which he was involved in virtually every major British domestic and international issue, about which there are thousands of documents and books. The full biography was so thorough and rich in detail that it has served as the jumping-off point for virtually every serious scholarly study of Churchill.



Gilbert condensed the 8-volume biography into a 1,000-page one-volume work, and he continued and expanded upon Randolph’s idea of editing companion volumes of documents that supported the biography, with extremely informative footnotes. The companion volumes are a treasure trove for historians (and it costs a bit of treasure to purchase them). He authored derivative works, such as Churchill and America and Churchill and the Jews, but it was his comprehensive biography and edited volumes of supporting selected documents that are his greatest legacies.



Gilbert’s detractors, and they are mostly British, considered him a hagiographer. Of course, his job as official biographer was to unearth facts and present them in a sympathetic light in an appealing narrative, and he accomplished that exceptionally well. He also was criticized for simply presenting and not analyzing his material, and indeed he was more reliable chronicler than a probing scholar. But it was a chronicle for the ages. A caring Jew and ardent Zionist, Gilbert was active in the Soviet Jewry movement during the Cold War, and wrote books about the Holocaust and Jewish and Zionist history. He also produced some excellent atlases on Israeli history and the Israel-Arab conflict. When I first met him about two decades ago, it was in Jerusalem. I recall walking down a street with him once and he was excited to see a plaque on a building he hadn’t noticed before. He loved detail, and Israel.



In my limited contact with Gilbert I sensed that it wasn’t always easy for him to be a Jew in his position. On the one hand, it was in a sense appropriate, since Jews in Britain and elsewhere were among Churchill’s most consistent supporters and admirers. Churchill was philo-Semitic and grew to become a leading Zionist, which caused him friction with Conservatives and Socialists alike. I recall Gilbert telling me that Randolph Churchill was also philo-Semitic. If memory serves, Gilbert said that Randolph had a penchant for hiring Jews as his researchers, and that he once hired an Indian, figuring he’d hire someone not Jewish for a change, but it turned out that man was Jewish as well! Still, in the half-century that Gilbert worked many in Britain weren’t sympathetic to Jews or Israel, and some were outright hostile to each, and I gathered that Gilbert felt his Jewishness wasn’t always well received. Clearly, Gilbert’s legacy will far outlive his life. We are above all indebted to him for his excellent research and writing about Churchill, making accessible to anyone who cares to read detailed knowledge about the life and achievements of this monumental statesman, which is in itself a significant contribution to history and Western civilization.

It was while Churchill was in India that he discovered an intense desire to learn history. He “resolved to read history, philosophy, economics, and things like that.” He wrote to his mother Jennie, asking her to send books – mostly history books. He “devoured” Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Macaulay’s 12-volume History of England. He also read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Darwin, Malthus, Aristotle, Plato and others.

Using his mother’s considerable influence, Churchill arranged to work as a war correspondent for the Pioneer newspaper and the Daily Telegraph. He traveled from Bangalore to Nowshera to join the Malakand Field Force at the front, where it was commanded by General Sir Bindon Blood. “For three years,” Churchill wrote in My Early Life, “the British held the summit of the Malakand Pass and thus had maintained the road from the Swat Valley and across the Swat River by many other valleys to Chitral.” The Malakand Pass was, according to historian Arthur Herman, “a deep cleft in a jagged bowl of mountainous ridges, guarded by a typical British garrison of Sikhs, Punjabis, and Bengal Lancers under the command of white officers.” Muslim Pathan tribes in the Swat Valley had attacked the soldiers holding the Malakand Pass and laid siege to Chakdara, the fort that defended the bridge across the Swat River.



This was a direct challenge to British imperial rule. Churchill wrote to his brother Jack on August 31, 1897, that “The frontier is a scene of great trouble and excitement. Practically all the fierce wild warlike tribes of Afghan stock . . . are in revolt.” He believed that “the time of offensive measures is now at hand. It is impossible,” he wrote, “for the British Government to be content with repelling an injury – it must be avenged.

Churchill was clearly excited about the impending battle and his participation in it. He wrote to his mother on September 5, 1897, that “At the first opportunity I am to be put on the strength of this force – which will give me a medal if I come through.” He continued, “As to the fighting, we march tomorrow, and before the week is out, there will be a battle – probably the biggest yet fought on the frontier this year.” He brashly yet prophetically told his mother that he had “faith in my star – that is that I am intended to do something in the world.”



Churchill was frequently at the front and under enemy fire. On one occasion, after other officers fell in battle, he commanded a company of Punjab infantry. According to William Manchester, “[t]here can be no doubt that he was remarkably brave, at times even rash.” In a letter he told his mother that he rode on his pony along a skirmish line while other soldiers sought cover on the ground. His commanding officers lauded his courage and bravery.

“The war in the mountains of the North-West Frontier,” wrote Churchill biographer Carlo D’Este, “was fierce and without quarter.” In one letter, Churchill described the fighting. “The tribesman,” he wrote, “torture the wounded & mutilate the dead. The troops never spare a man who falls into their hands – whether he be wounded or not . . . The picture is a terrible one.” In one instance of reprisals, Churchill wrote, “we proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.”



In one of his dispatches that appeared in the Daily Telegraph on November 6, 1897, Churchill eloquently explained the situation faced by Britain on the North-West Frontier: The rising of 1897 is the most successful attempt hitherto made to combine the frontier tribes. It will not be the last.. . . The simultaneous revolt of distant tribes is an evidence of secret workings. . . Civilization is face to face with militant Mohammedanism. When we reflect on the moral and material forces arrayed, there need be no fear of the ultimate issue, but the longer the policy of half-measures is adhered to the more distant the end of the struggle will be. An interference more galling than complete control, a timidity more rash than reckless, a clemency more cruel than the utmost severity, mark our present dealings with the frontier tribes. To terminate this sorry state of affairs it is necessary to carry a recognized and admitted policy to its logical and inevitable conclusion; to obtain the Gilgit-Chitral-Jellalabad-Kandahar frontier, and reduce to law and order everything South of that line.

Churchill returned to Bangalore and garrison duty, and used the time to write his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which was published in 1898. Churchill began this book with a vivid description of the geography of the battlefield. “The Malakand,” he wrote, “is like a great cup, of which the rim is broken into numerous clefts, and jagged points.” The Malakand Pass was the deepest cleft. Guarding the pass was a fort, Chakdara, which overlooked a “broad graded road [that] runs like a ribbon across the plain.” The road crosses a mountain pass then “leads to the fortified bridge across the [Swat] river.” “Without this road,” Churchill explained, “there would have been no Malakand Camps, no fighting, no Malakand Field Force, no story. It is the road to Chitral.” British governments, with the exception of Lord Rosebery’s, had since 1876, he wrote, followed a “forward policy” on the North-West Frontier, and that meant holding Chitral.



He described the conflict as “the great tribal upheaval of 1897,” and attributed its cause to a Mohammedan jihad against the infidel. “The mine was fired,” he wrote. “The flame ran along the ground. The explosion burst forth in all directions.” In late July 1897, the Malakand Camp was repeatedly assaulted by the enemy along the two roads that accessed the camp. After heavy fighting and considerable losses on both sides, the tribesmen realized that the Malakand Camp could not be taken. “Thus,” wrote Churchill, “the long and persistent attack on the British frontier station of Malakand, languished and ceased.”

The enemy now laid siege to Chakdara fort. Churchill noted that India’s Governor-General in Council determined to come to the relief of the besieged fort and ordered General Sir Bindon Blood to form the Malakand Field Force for that purpose. Blood’s troops reached the Malakand on August 1st, and the next day went into action and successfully relieved the siege of the fort. Then, Churchill wrote, “[t]he 11th Bengal Lancers, forming a line across the plain, began a merciless pursuit up the valley.” “No quarter was asked or given,” Churchill noted, “and every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.” Commenting on the scene of carnage, Churchill memorably wrote: “The spectator who may gaze unmoved on the bloodshed of the battle, must avert his eyes from the horrors of the pursuit, unless, indeed, joining in it himself, he flings all scruples to the winds, and indulges to the full those deep-seated instincts of savagery, over which civilization has but cast a veil of doubtful thickness.