"The young, evolving Churchill was sure he would die early and had to accomplish great things, not be the loser his father proclaimed him to be"

"To get the brilliant Churchill,” says Carlo D’Este, “you had to take the human, flawed Churchill, the man obsessed with making something of himself.” In Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874–1945, D’Este, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and acclaimed military historian (Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943) and biographer (Patton: A Genius for War and Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life), looks at Britain’s fabled leader through a revealing lens: how the military background of this descendant of the Duke of Marlborough shaped his paradoxical character—and thus his fateful decisions during World War II. Unsparing yet balanced, the detailed portrait that emerges is fluidly written, deeply informed, and often surprising.

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Why Winston Churchill?
I looked at the spectrum of books about him; there was no full-length military biography. You cannot begin to understand your character unless you look at the entire life. I learned this writing about Patton and Eisenhower. You can define each of my biographies by one word. Patton: dyslexia. Eisenhower: poverty. For Churchill, it’s rejection, starting with his father, who ignored or belittled him. That drove him to greatness.

How did you start?
With what I call “the circle.” To delve into a character, go to folks closest to him. Of course, Churchill’s circle was enormous. But that generation wrote diaries, memoirs, letters. I pity biographers of the 21st century; e-mail disappears.

So you dove into archives.
From experience, I sensed there had to be something new—and there was. Sir John Dill’s papers turned up at King’s College: memos with Churchill’s minutes in red ink and Dill’s replies, which showed Dill was stronger than people thought. The Shane Leslie papers—nobody’s seen them before. Leslie was very bright: articulate, a good writer, a cousin who grew up with Churchill and admired him but saw his real character. He offers keys to Churchill’s childhood—the key to understanding World War II. [Churchill] grew up rebellious, doing whatever he wanted—bullying, cajoling—to get what he wanted. This is the ruthless Churchill of World War II, one of the most ruthless people I’ve ever studied. He had to be, for Britain to survive.

He was a child of empire.
Queen Victoria was the center of the universe, and he saw Britain as the guiding light of civilization. But the Empire was already on its way out. Beneath the surface in India and South Africa was its seamy side: money, power, greed. South Africa was the Empire’s Vietnam. But to his death, Churchill dreamed of reviving it.

And what of his role in the Boer War?
The young, evolving Churchill was sure he would die early and had to accomplish great things, not be the loser his father proclaimed him to be. The Boer War made him. His main virtue, consistent during World War II, was his ability to take advantage of situations as they came up. In his great train escapade, he, a journalist, took charge of defending a British train, was captured by the Boers, and escaped. He demonstrated undeniable courage and became a hero. Yet his dispatches early on say, “This isn’t gonna go the way you think. It’s not gonna be over by Christmas.”

A man of action and ideas.
[Arthur] Balfour said, “Churchill has 100 ideas a day, but only four are good.” Hell, who has four good ideas a day? And he was able to articulate them, to use that incredible, complex mind to get others to think from new angles. That’s amazing, and central to his leadership. It led directly to tanks, strategic bombing, and countless other technical developments in World War II.

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