Churchill, The Great Game and Total War,
by David Jablonsky. Portland OR: International Specialized Book Service, 1991.

The mention of the name of Winston Churchill conjures up an image of the eloquent, tenacious, dynamic, cigar-chomping, “V”-sign waving British Prime Minister who led the Island Race indefatigably during its “finest hour” of the Second World War.  For this accomplishment Churchill will always be remembered.

Churchill was a very complex, multifaceted character.  Colonel David Jablonsky, a faculty member of the U.S. Army War College, wrote this book to dissect Churchill’s diverse personality and the development of his attitudes towards the “Great Game” of “secret intelligence, cloak and dagger operations, and espionage,” and warfare.

Churchill grew up during the last quarter century of Queen Victoria’s long reign and of the “Pax Britannica.”  As a result, he became imbued with the romantic, optimistic, and chivalrous concepts of Imperial patriotism and warfare.  Participation in three Victorian military campaigns, which were more akin to a game than to war, reinforced these ideals, as well as his insatiable desire for fame and glory.  Churchill’s upbringing and early experiences caused him to be a historically minded, rationally pragmatic, extroverted intuitive.

Clausewitz’s “remarkable trinity” of the government, the people, and the army were, during the First World War, for the first time focused on total war.  Churchill, according to Jablonsky, astutely recognized this situation, as well as the linkage between total war and the concepts of attrition and exhaustion.  This resulted in his ardent advocacy of the use of intelligence and surprise to break the bloody stalemate on the Western Front.

Churchill’s attitudes were fully developed by the time he became Prime Minister in 1940, and he built upon his earlier successful experiences with a renewed sense of historical certainty.  There were occasions, however, when he showed “the same romantic impetuousness and failure to calculate that he had demonstrated in World War I.”  The net result of Churchill’s World War ll performance, as suggested by the author, is that he was “the quintessential example of a leader in total war” (p. 185).

This book is based primarily on Churchill’s own voluminous and self-revelatory publications which tends to make the analysis rather one-sided.  This approach is acceptable, as the author acknowledges this work to be “a personal interpretation.”  The use of selected secondary sources to buttress his arguments has, however, distorted this interpretation.  For example, there is a misunderstanding of the decision-making process behind the 1941 dispatch of British troops to Greece (p. 132), an inaccurate assessment of the British ability to adequately prepare the defenses of Crete (p. 137), and an invalid condemnation of Wavell’s underestimation of Rommel’s ability to attack in the spring of 1941 (p. 163), when MI-14 in London provided the same estimation to Churchill.

 Colonel Jablonsky’s Churchill, The Great Game and Total War is definitely an interesting and insightful analysis of the personality of one of the twentieth century’s leading figures.  He shows convincingly that Churchill was indeed “a patrician product of the Indian Summer of the Victorian age.”  It is obvious that the author enjoyed writing this book as much as this reviewer enjoyed reading it.

Book Review, Churchill, The Great Game and Total War, by David Jablonsky, Journal of Military History 58 (January 1994): 157-158.