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.
* 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.