How competent was Churchill as a strategist, putting aside his unmoving resolve?

Strategic goals that Churchill grasped and prosecuted were:
* The Empire could not win unaided.
* Fight on the European mainland only when absolutely necessary
* Keep the UK in the war by providing a continual series of smaller battles on the periphery (eg Africa, Arabia, Greece) to boost public morale
* Sacrifice the Empire to keep the UK safe. During WW2 he pissed off the Australians and the Indians, and lost Singapore and Burma.
* Use the mechanised resources of the UK to conduct a bombing campaign and scaling it up dramatically. Whilst Harris was wrong in thinking Germany could be reduced solely by bombing, it forced the Germans to devote resources to homeland security instead of the Eastern Front.
* Convert the UK to a 100% wartime economy. Hitler did not do this for Germany until very late in the war

These insights: fight the battles you can win, ignore the ones you can't, sacrifice the periphery to save the centre, seek all allies available, let other countries absorb the blood cost, ensured the UK survived WW2 and defeated Hitler. But it did cost the UK the Empire.
 

MatthewB

Banned
But it did cost the UK the Empire.
I'd say the empire was done regardless. Canada and ANZ were already for all intents and purposes independent, India was hell bent on independence, and once India's gone, the reason for much of the rest is too. Maybe if oil had been discovered earlier in Nigeria, Newfoundland, etc. they may have been worth keeping, but much of the rest of the empire was a net drain on the mother country.
 
Strategic goals that Churchill grasped and prosecuted were:
* The Empire could not win unaided.
* Fight on the European mainland only when absolutely necessary
* Keep the UK in the war by providing a continual series of smaller battles on the periphery (eg Africa, Arabia, Greece) to boost public morale
* Sacrifice the Empire to keep the UK safe. During WW2 he pissed off the Australians and the Indians, and lost Singapore and Burma.
* Use the mechanised resources of the UK to conduct a bombing campaign and scaling it up dramatically. Whilst Harris was wrong in thinking Germany could be reduced solely by bombing, it forced the Germans to devote resources to homeland security instead of the Eastern Front.
* Convert the UK to a 100% wartime economy. Hitler did not do this for Germany until very late in the war

These insights: fight the battles you can win, ignore the ones you can't, sacrifice the periphery to save the centre, seek all allies available, let other countries absorb the blood cost, ensured the UK survived WW2 and defeated Hitler. But it did cost the UK the Empire.
So running through those points in order:
  • Pretty blindingly obvious, it’s how Britain has fought its major wars for centuries
  • So why then the mad enthusiasm for charging into mainland Europe? Norway, Greece, Italy, Dieppe, Balkans, sometimes it appears Churchill was all about flinging men at the mainland at the flimsiest pretext.
  • Winning peripheral battles is a pretty sound strategy, shame that so many of them ended up being lost. And what battles happened in Arabia? Do you mean the colonial uprising in Iraq? Or perhaps the successful war against France in Syria?
  • Bleeding colonies white for the mother country is what colonies are there for
  • Not going near the Bomber Command discussion, that way lies heartburn
  • Again, so blindingly obvious it was in fact done by Chamberlain before the war even started.
So your summary of Churchill’s achievements is that he had a series of fairly pedestrian strategic insights and managed to muddle through the war to emerge triumphant, bankrupt and shorn of empire at the end. It’s not a very ringing endorsement is it?
 

JAG88

Banned
* Keep the UK in the war by providing a continual series of smaller battles on the periphery (eg Africa, Arabia, Greece) to boost public morale.

...aaaand then railroads became widespread making such a tactic only marginally useful... plus whenever Churchill tried that had his teeth kicked in.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
That sounds like propaganda... dominate what? Lebensraum was meant to make Germany impervious to a hunger blockade, hence Ukraine, it was a defensive measure, a savage one without doubt.

In fact, Hitler was aiming to imitate the US, seeing lebensraum exactly as the US expansion in the west, and he had no problem with the US beyond the suspicion of being controlled by the jews... wonder what he would think on taht regard if he saw the world right now...
Nice.

The Reich's efforts in General Government and the USSR were not meant to provide a food buffer in case of some aggression by the West. Hell, even Goebbels rarely tried to trot that one out.

It was meant to remove and replace an entire ethnic group, in addition to the already actively hunted Jews and Roma, from the face of the planet as a vibrant society. The goal was to obliterate 80%+ of the Slavs on Earth in order to give their lands (where they had been living for, oh, 1,300-1,400 years) to the supposedly racially superior German people.

It was, in a lot of ways, similar to the disgraceful efforts of the U.S. government to ethnically cleanse large swaths of North America of the indigenous peoples that were "in the way", but conducted on a scale that, quite literally, boggles the mind. Unlike many other similar, although smaller scale ethnic cleansing efforts, it did not even bother to try to justify itself (a sign of just how sure the Reich's leadership was that they were, in fact, chosen people superior to all others).

I have no illusions that anything I have just written will, in any way, sway your beliefs, particularly after reviewing many of your other recent posts.. Been around that block too many times.

What I do have far more confidence about is that I can stop the active dissemination of such utter tripe.

We divorce you.

To Coventry with you
 
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