The Web & the Weaver

THEIR FINEST HOUR (751 pp.)--Winston S. Churchill--Houghton Mifflin ($6).

"The elimination of the French Navy [at Oran, Alexandria and Dakar] . . . produced a profound impression in every country. Here was this Britain which . . . strangers had supposed to be quivering on the brink of surrender . . . striking ruthlessly at her dearest friends of yesterday . . . It was made plain that the British War Cabinet feared nothing and would stop at nothing,"

In these words, the man who made British determination plain to the world strikes the major theme of the second volume of his World War II memoirs. The title, Their Finest Hour, means just what it suggests--an hour in which the shames and hesitancies of the British past have been whipped out of sight, and the triumphs and tragedies of later years are still unforeseeable. Only the absorbing, solitary hour of the British crisis is present--the decisive hour in which the past must be redeemed and the future secured. It was to this decisive moment that Churchill called upon the people of Britain to respond "and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say: 'This was their finest hour.' "

Gaiety, high spirits, even joy surge up in Author Churchill at the thought of the hour's magnificence and his place in it--to stand, supreme at last, in an hour of desperate hope, and to find his mood echoed in every city and hamlet of Britain. The prospect of Nazi invasion is inspiring, providing "the chance of striking a blow at the mighty enemy which would resound throughout the world."

The Time Is Now. The hour is not only Britain's finest, but Churchill's, calling upon him to exert to the full every talent and scrap of wisdom of his 65 knowledgeable years. Out from under their old wraps he brings a host of favorite, once-rejected projects (such as the portable concrete harbors and LCT's which he had first blueprinted in World War I) and a mass of experience concerning everything from seas and men to small arms and bomb fuzes. Above all, he sets out to turn the menaced island nation into "a spider's web of communications."

Churchill recreates the time in absorbing detail. Here is London, aflame with nightly blazes but vigorously "adapting itself to the new peculiar conditions of existence or death," the factories in which "men and women toiled at the lathes . . . till they fell exhausted on the floor and had to be dragged away," the "vast intricate systems of fortifications . . . antitank obstacles, blockhouses," the secret rooms in which hidden scientists fought the "wizard war" of radar.

Some sectors of the web stand out with special pathos or splendor: aged members of the Home Guard clutching club and pike; the tormented heroes of the bomb-disposal squads, whose faces "seemed different from those of ordinary men . . . gaunt. . . haggard . . . bluish . . . bright, gleaming eyes and exceptional compression of the lips; withal a perfect demeanour"; the dispossessed in the bombed-out ruins of Peckham, whose cheerful fortitude brought tears to the Prime Minister's eyes. The web's perimeter, the deep-indented, 2,000-mile British coastline, is rounded off by the unsleeping, patrolling navy, evoking from old Sea Scholar Churchill the blissful, almost dreamy remark: "Seapower, when properly understood, is a wonderful thing."

For both Churchill and his new friend, Franklin Roosevelt, the issue was the same --to destroy Hitler. Churchill's task, beyond preparing to meet the onslaught of the Germans, was not, as he tells it, to win Roosevelt over, but to help and hurry him in winning the U.S. public over to their common view.

In this, Churchill's diplomacy is a superb combination of tact and inexorable firmness. While never forgetful of the President's constitutional limitations, Churchill also never forgets that such limitations might well prove fatal. "The President should bear . . . very clearly in mind," he instructs British Ambassador Lord-Lothian, that the U.S. cannot afford "any complacent assumption . . . that they will pick up the debris of the British Empire . . ." His own remarks to Roosevelt are sometimes genially humble ("I am so grateful to you for all the trouble you have been taking . . ."), sometimes confidently flattering ("I am sure that, with your comprehension of the sea affair, you will not let this crux ... go wrong for want of ... destroyers"). The blunt instrument is reserved for extreme use: "Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now."

Bringing Home the Bacon. But the great events of this volume--the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain--do not alone present a complete portrait of Churchill himself. To Churchill the diplomat, the high-spirited artist of war, the politician who understood himself and thus understood the British people, must be added Churchill the tireless observer of small things, the accountant who knows that pennies make the pound.

Mostly buried in the appendices of Their Finest Hour are the unromantic details--the huffy commands ("The Prime Minister has noticed that the habit of private secretaries . . . addressing each other by their Christian names ... is increasing, and ought to be stopped"), the interminable questions fired at his subordinates: "What arrangements are you making for curing surplus bacon?"; "How many square feet of glass have been destroyed up to date?"; "Surely you can run to a new Admiralty flag. It grieves me to see the present dingy object every morning." And, as a final touch to the whole figure, there is the Churchill whose mind remembers Virgil when a bomb strikes London's Carlton Club, rendezvous of generations of Conservative politicians. Writes Churchill: "Mr. Quentin Hogg . . . carried his father, a former Lord Chancellor, on his shoulders from the wreck, as Aeneas had borne Pater Anchises from the ruins of Troy."

There are not many statesmen left to whom such a thought would occur--much less who would have the zest to put it down. But then, there never have been many remotely like Winston Churchill.

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