Stiff upper lips and two baths a day
Oct. 28th, 2025 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileOctober’s installment in my Year of Erics was Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz. This 500-page chonker covers Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister, from May 1940 to May 1941, when England was suffering a campaign of bombing raids from Germany and before the U.S. had entered the war.
Churchill was a weird guy, and it’s interesting to get a look at him from the POVs of all the folks around him–his teenage daughter Mary, his private secretary John Colville, and assorted other relatives, staff members, and diplomats that wrote letters, diaries, and memoirs about their experiences with him. (The book also quotes quite a bit from the private writings of German officials who hated him, mainly Goring.) The result is an up close and personal look at the day-to-day affairs of conducting the war during the Blitz, not only for Churchill but also for all sorts of less famous folks who still had to get up and go to work in a war zone during what felt like an apocalypse (making this sort of book that many a plaintive Tweet has accused history books of not being). For me, personally, all these other people were much more interesting than Churchill himself, even though he is objectively an interesting character. But he was also Prime Minister; conducting the war was his job, and I’m somewhat more interested in all the people who had the war going on on top of other responsibilities (or, for the young people, on top of going out partying).
Churchill has been written about a lot, but I will concede that this obviousness and Great Man of History status (a concept I think is kind of bullshit) doesn’t prevent him from being the correct subject of the book. First of all, he provided a single central figure for it to be structured around, thus saving us from a repeat of whatever was going on in Devil in the White City. Second of all, it is genuinely interesting to see what Doing Great Leadership in a situation like that seems to have consisted of; I would not normally have put “bitching at people to write shorter reports” at the top of that list, but also I know from experience that people don’t listen when such a directive comes from inoffensive support staff, and plan to include the “Brevity” memo in future trainings at work to try to lend them some clout.
Anyway, I am getting off topic. World War II is one of those topics that is so big and so multifaceted that every time I read something about it I learn new stuff. I don’t think I really had a great grasp of just how destructive the Blitz was, though I certainly knew it existed. I also didn’t know about too many of the characters around the Churchills, except for the legless flying ace Douglas Bader, who also showed up in Ben MacIntyre’s book about Colditz that I read last year.
This is maybe not the deepest or most academic book about World War II out there nor is it asking the deep probing questions that World War II forces us to ask, like “How did Nazism happen?” But it’s a fun read all the same, a well-written “dad history” about a bunch of people living through a very difficult time and a deeply weird man who was 100% committed to Doing Leadership until the cavalry (i.e. the United States) arrived.
Churchill was a weird guy, and it’s interesting to get a look at him from the POVs of all the folks around him–his teenage daughter Mary, his private secretary John Colville, and assorted other relatives, staff members, and diplomats that wrote letters, diaries, and memoirs about their experiences with him. (The book also quotes quite a bit from the private writings of German officials who hated him, mainly Goring.) The result is an up close and personal look at the day-to-day affairs of conducting the war during the Blitz, not only for Churchill but also for all sorts of less famous folks who still had to get up and go to work in a war zone during what felt like an apocalypse (making this sort of book that many a plaintive Tweet has accused history books of not being). For me, personally, all these other people were much more interesting than Churchill himself, even though he is objectively an interesting character. But he was also Prime Minister; conducting the war was his job, and I’m somewhat more interested in all the people who had the war going on on top of other responsibilities (or, for the young people, on top of going out partying).
Churchill has been written about a lot, but I will concede that this obviousness and Great Man of History status (a concept I think is kind of bullshit) doesn’t prevent him from being the correct subject of the book. First of all, he provided a single central figure for it to be structured around, thus saving us from a repeat of whatever was going on in Devil in the White City. Second of all, it is genuinely interesting to see what Doing Great Leadership in a situation like that seems to have consisted of; I would not normally have put “bitching at people to write shorter reports” at the top of that list, but also I know from experience that people don’t listen when such a directive comes from inoffensive support staff, and plan to include the “Brevity” memo in future trainings at work to try to lend them some clout.
Anyway, I am getting off topic. World War II is one of those topics that is so big and so multifaceted that every time I read something about it I learn new stuff. I don’t think I really had a great grasp of just how destructive the Blitz was, though I certainly knew it existed. I also didn’t know about too many of the characters around the Churchills, except for the legless flying ace Douglas Bader, who also showed up in Ben MacIntyre’s book about Colditz that I read last year.
This is maybe not the deepest or most academic book about World War II out there nor is it asking the deep probing questions that World War II forces us to ask, like “How did Nazism happen?” But it’s a fun read all the same, a well-written “dad history” about a bunch of people living through a very difficult time and a deeply weird man who was 100% committed to Doing Leadership until the cavalry (i.e. the United States) arrived.
