The three books reviewed here are disparate in subject matter but have a common theme—the character of the men who made Britain a great world power in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and helped the nation survive during its decline in the twentieth century. As such, these works are relevant to students of history as examples of leadership and decision-making.
Horatio Nelson* is an excellent subject for the psychohistorian, a classic example (like his inveterate enemy Napoleon Bonaparte) of the slight, short man compensating in his work and personal life for feelings of physical inferiority. During his early inconspicuous career, he demonstrated courage and high spirits. Nelson, once emerging from a deep depression, told a friend: ‘‘I will be a hero, and confiding in Providence, I will brave every danger.’’ His rapid early advancement in the Royal Navy can be ascribed to the influence of his navy captain uncle, though his own charm and simplicity endeared him to both superiors and subordinates. Nelson’s intense dislike of the French and strong distrust of the reformers of his time were exceeded only by his hatred of corruption.
*Ernie Bradford, Nelson: The Essential Hero (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, $12.95), 367 pages.
In 1793, Nelson became commander of the Agamemnon and by 1796 was a commodore, well on the way to becoming an admiral. But the year was not a happy one for Britain. Everywhere the French were successful, and Nelson was beginning to feel the strain of war.
During the serious British naval mutinies in 1797, Nelson was transferred to the Theseus and lauded for his commands at the siege of Cadiz and in the battles of Abukir Bay, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.
Britain needed a hero; thus Nelson returned to sea in March 1798 and soon was in command of a Mediterranean fleet. His main task was to determine the objective of Bonaparte and his expedition, which had sailed southward from Toulon. Nelson guessed that the French were set either on the conquest of Sicily or Egypt. On 1 August 1798, he found the French fleet at Abukir Bay. In the battle that ensued, Nelson vanquished the French and isolated Napoleon in Egypt but was himself blinded temporarily by a forehead wound. It was one of the most complete naval victories ever recorded, and he was now the "brave, gallant immortalized Nelson," a hero to all of Europe. Nelson returned to England where he was hailed as a conquering hero and invested with a peerage.
As the Napoleonic wars intensified, Nelson returned to sea and became second in command of the Channel Fleet. On 2 April 1801, he brilliantly destroyed the fleet of Napoleon’s Danish ally and assured Britain’s dominance in the Baltic Sea and the dissolution of the League of Armed Neutrality.
From 1803 to 1805, Nelson parried and chased the skillful French Admiral Villeneuve and the combined Franco-Spanish fleets in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the West Indies. The final contest occurred at Cape Trafalgar in late October 1805. Although the battle was a resounding victory for Nelson, he was defeated by death.
Nelson has been the subject of numerous biographies, but few (including a more recent study by David Walder) surpass Bradford’s study in detail, clarity, and interest, and presentation of Nelson as a great naval commander with all the frailties of an ordinary human being. Bradford’s biography certainly has far more substance than John Watney’s pleasant, but thin, portrait of the Churchill family.
Author John Watney takes the reader on a hurried view of the Churchills from Arabella in the seventeenth century to Winston in the twentieth.* Emphasis is on the family tradition of military service, which is apparent only in John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough; Winston’s father, the tragic Lord Randolph Churchill; and Winston himself. There is no denying that the family was "creative, eccentric, gifted, elegant." Of course, the real hero of the book is Winston, and its most original part is Watney’s brief reminiscence of "Winston at War." For a history of the Churchills, one must still turn to A. L. Rowse’s chronicle of the family.
*John Watney, The Churchills: Portrait of a Great Fami1y (New York: Gordon-Cremonesi, 1977, $17.95), 168 pages.
Churchills’s close associate and political heir, Sir Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, was quite unusual in the way he wrote his autobiography.*** For political reasons, he began with the last period of his life and worked backward. Thus, while the previous three volumes are the record of his career as Foreign Secretary for Neville Chamberlain and Churchill and Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, the fourth volume highlights his childhood and youth.
*Anthony Eden, Another World, 1897-1917(Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1977, $7.95), 175 pages.
It is an interesting account of Eden’s soul-searing experiences on the western front in World War I. It is a restrained and poignant memoir of service in one of the deadliest wars in human history by a man who endured senseless carnage and rose from platoon leader at the age of eighteen to adjutant at nineteen to brigade major at twenty. But the real meaning of Eden’s early years is summed up in the remark: "I had entered the holocaust still childish and I emerged tempered by my experience and bereft of many friends, but with my illusions intact, neither shattered nor cynical, to face a changed world." Eden certainly epitomized the courage and resilience of the last generation of that class born to rule Britain, even though historians recorded him as one of Britain’s least successful prime ministers. In a sense, these books are a commentary on and study of leadership—two successes and one failure. But then stories of success and failure are proof of the fact that nothing is an unqualified success or an unmitigated failure in the lives of men.
Georgia State University, Atlanta
Contributor
Joseph O. Baylen (B.Ed., Northern Illinois University; M.A., Emory University, University of New Mexico) is Regents’ Professor of History, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1958-59 and a Fulbright-Hays Senior Lecturer in the United Kingdom in 1961-62 and 1972-73. Dr. Baylen is author of four books and numerous articles.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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