Winston Churchill's War Leadership Read Online Free PDF

the most secret sort. Several times each day Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff received what Churchill called his “golden eggs”—the intercepted top-secret German radio communications, including many from Hitler himself, transmitted through the Enigma machine. These messages were decrypted at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, by a staff that was to exceed five thousand before the end of the war.
    These “golden eggs”—laid, Churchill once remarked, “by the geese who never cackled,” the staff at Bletchley—gave Churchill and those in the inner circle an insight, unique in the history of modern warfare, into the strategic thinking and tactical intentions of the enemy. Beyond the staff at Bletchley, the number of people privy to the Enigma decrypts was strictly limited: in September 1940 only thirty-one people within the governing instrument in London were aware of their existence or able to take them into account in policy making. When Churchill learned of a dozen others in receipt of this information, he cut most of them out, minuting to the head of the Secret Intelligence Services: “The wild scattering of secret information must be curbed.” Beyond the small group in London—who included King George VI—the others who knew of this most secret source were the land, sea and air commanders-in-chief, to whom the relevant aspects were transmitted, and the Special Liaison Unit officers at the commander-inchiefs’ headquarters, who decoded them.
    During the Cold War decades that followed the Second World War, none of the participants in these Enigma-based decisions were able to refer to them in their memoirs, a ban that also applied to Churchill. Secrecy had to be maintained, as the Enigma machine continued to be used by several post-war governments. As a result, both at the time and even as late as the beginning of the twenty-first century, many major British wartime decisions have been seen as absurd, unintelligible, or as the result of Churchill’s personal interference. For Churchill, his War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff, the Enigma revelations played a crucial role in the process of deciding how to respond and where to strike. Along with its innumerable tactical and strategic benefits, Enigma also revealed some of the innermost decision-making processes of the enemy.
    The search for, and achievement of, national unity was another vital aspect of Churchill’s war leadership. From the outset of his premiership, Churchill determined to set aside the hostilities and animosities of the pre-war years. For almost a decade he had been the most outspoken critic of the government of the day, castigating it in Parliament, in public and in print for its neglect of national defence. The country had been as divided as its politicians, and vitriol had been the order of the day. From the first days of Churchill’s war government, however, those who had been his severest critics, and whom he had most severely criticized, became, at his request, colleagues charged with averting defeat and preserving the realm. A few hours before he became Prime Minister, his son, Randolph, asked whether he would achieve the highest place—arguably his father’s ambition for more than thirty years. Churchill replied, “Nothing matters now except beating the enemy.”
    When he formed his government on 10 May 1940, Churchill was confronted by near outrage among some of his closest friends and allies for giving high positions to former adversaries, including those who had kept him out of office and had belittled his policies on the eve of war. Churchill was emphatic in his reply. “As for me,” he wrote to one pre-war adversary who had apologized for his role in trying to remove Churchill from Parliament, “the past is dead.” Two days before he became Prime Minister, during the debate in the House of Commons when Chamberlain’s leadership and Churchill’s conduct of the Norwegian Campaign were both under attack, Churchill