FINEST YEARS: Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945.
Max Hastings
Harper Press, $39.99, pbk
When I was a few months old in 1940, a German pilot hedgehopping his way back towards the English Channel decided to have a little fun by firing a burst at a girl wheeling a pram along an English country lane.
The girl - my older sister - escaped by throwing herself into the ditch while I was even luckier because the bullets that punched holes in my pram and ripped away its hood somehow missed me.
The greatly reduced state of my pram, in which I slept at night, came in handy a few months later because it made it easier for me to lower myself to the floor when the air-raid sirens sounded.
Unable to talk and barely able to walk, I was schooled at the sound of the sirens to get myself downstairs to the back door, there to await the same sister whose job it was to rush me down the garden to our small bomb shelter.
Living where we did, less than half a mile from the Royal Navy's largest munitions depot on the edge of Portsmouth Harbour, the bombs rained down thickly and on more than one night the debris clattered around us as we scurried down the garden.
Oh what jolly good fun it all was, according to journalist Max Hastings.
Rallied by a few stentorian phrases on radio broadcasts from Downing Street, apparently, we thought little of the hardships of war and, truth to tell, never took it all that seriously.
If Winnie told us to enjoy it, naturally we did.
It was no great surprise to me to discover that Hastings was not born until after the end of World War 2 and had no personal experience of it.
But that has not stopped him writing extensively about the war in various books, the latest of which is Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45.
When you read the book's opening words - "Winston Churchill was the greatest Englishman and one of the greatest human beings of the 20th century, indeed of all time" - you know that what follows is going to be hagiography.
As, indeed, it is, although Hastings chronicles Churchill's many blunders without any seeming awareness that these might detract from the stature of his hero.
Hastings himself comes close to grasping this paradox when he writes, "In May 1940 [when the House of Commons deposed then prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Churchill acceded to the office] while few influential figures questioned Churchill's brilliance or oratorical genius, they perceived his career as wreathed in misjudgements."
Bearing in mind that one of the biggest and earliest misjudgements had been Churchill's championing of the Gallipoli landings in World War 1, one may wonder how the man became prime minister.
Hastings barely touches on this, apart from musing that Churchill would have fared no better than Chamberlain in trying to stave off war and quoting how much opposition there was within the ruling Conservative Party to him.
Hastings contents himself with quoting from Churchill's grandiose speeches and sees no irony in his own summary that Churchill "thrilled to his own ascent to Britain's leadership".
Perhaps one should not read more into the remark than Hastings intended, but the chronicle of Churchill's stewardship that rolls portentously from his pen demonstrates just how much it was all about Churchill's love of being in charge, his determination to have his own way on everything and the callous way he dismissed those who tried to urge caution.
Whether it was lowly typists or the most senior of commanders, nothing seemed to give Churchill greater pleasure than humiliating them in front of others.
Perhaps it is the public school background he shared with Churchill that leads Hastings to believe that the biggest bully in the school is automatically the best boy.
It could be said that the only difference between Hitler and Churchill was the schools they attended.
Churchill was his twin as a dictator, as Hastings admits when he acknowledges that Churchill wielded more power than any British prime minister before or since.
Hitler is often derided for throwing away armies on ill-conceived gambles and precisely the same could be said of Churchill squandering hundreds of thousands of men and tons of precious materiel on landings early in the war in Norway, France, Greece, North Africa and Crete for which there was little justification and considerable opposition from his commanders.
The image of Churchill that emerges is of a schoolboy who finally gets his hands on his older brother's toy soldiers and is determined to fight battles with them because his ego tells him he knows best.
Hastings glories in this Churchill; soldiers' families who received telegrams saying "It is with the gravest regret that I have to inform you . . ."
may not share his enthusiasm.
And right there, again, is the ever-present paradox of this book.
Hastings paints strikingly conflicting portraits of Churchill and then brushes the harsh one aside to embrace the kinder view, without ever satisfactorily explaining why we should accept his judgement that Churchill was "superman".
One suspects the key lies in Hastings' occupation as a journalist and his identification with a man who was an acknowledged master of the media.
As a military strategist, Churchill was a disaster on a massive scale; as a propagandist, there was none better.
He was, of course, a politician first and last with every politician's daily fear of losing the next vote.
His control of Parliament was never total (in 1942 he had to scramble to ward off a vote of censure) and he was conscious that he had not been elected by the people as their leader.
Hastings lauds the way Churchill's speeches rallied the people to war without seeming conscious that Churchill had any other motive for his rhetoric.
Churchill's biggest achievement was to persuade England that it could stand up to Hitler and the armies that had ridden roughshod across Europe; that they and they alone could defend their island come what may.
Invasion was, in fact, never a particularly likely scenario but he certainly convinced the country that it must prepare for that eventuality and, in preparing, make itself a stronger country that could become the springboard to a larger victory.
It is a tribute to Churchill's powers to transform a nation's mindset that by the time I was 11 (six years after war ended and Churchill lost the inevitable public vote), I was an army cadet with a full military uniform (including boots with a reflection you could use for shaving, had I been old enough), a .303 rifle and live ammunition.
By 13, I could put a cluster of bullets in a target at 1000 yards; by 15, I could not only drive a tank but strip it down to locate a malfunction; at 18, I had had my first taste of naval adventure, sitting silently in a submarine on the bottom of the English Channel evading detection by "enemy" ships.
That drive for well-prepared self-sufficiency was Churchill's legacy that lingered long after the giant had been felled.
That his words spoke louder than his deeds is beyond questioning.
In the end, even Hastings is driven to the verdict that Churchill "possessed the ability, through his oratory, to invest with majesty the deeds and even failures of mortal men . . . [He] caused words to become not mere assertions of fact or expressions of intent, but acts of governance.
Most of all, Churchill empowered millions to look beyond the havoc of the battlefield, the squalor of their domestic circumstances amid privation and bombardment, and to perceive a higher purpose in their struggles and sacrifices."
Churchill did on occasion visit our seaside village but I doubt he saw my war-battered pram.
If he had, he would probably have told me I had no business using a pram for my convenience when instead I could walk and donate the metal to the war effort.
Toddler or not, I am sure I would have believed him.
Because of him, my life turned out quite differently from what might have been.
Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
