Churchill's Gillie

THE BLAST OF WAR 1939-1945 by Harold Macmillan. 623 pages. Harper & Row. $11.95.

History has already dimmed the never sharply defined figure of Harold Macmillan. He had the misfortune to become Prime Minister in time to help preside, in Churchill's phrase, "over the liquidation of the British Empire." Often photographed in hairy tweed knickerbockers while shooting in the Scotch Highlands, Macmillan projected an image of woebegone Toryism anachronistic in the postwar scene of swinging Britain. That this image was misleading could be seen from the first volume of his memoirs (TIME, Sept. 30, 1966) in which he emerged as a humorous and generous-minded man, sharply aware of the currents of history, and a man, moreover, of liberal sympathies and considerable intelligence. Also, Publisher-Politician Macmillan could write better than any contemporary politician except Winston Churchill and better than any publisher except Leonard Woolf. All these qualities are alive and present in his long second volume, which records six dismal years of World War II in far from dismal fashion.

A Bomb at the Club. Macmillan's tone is just right--involved yet detached, never querulous but capable of showing marked distaste, even derision, for some of the bad actors in the great drama of this century. He is never grandiloquent, and for this reason the reader is likely to trust him more than Winston Churchill, whose rhetorical afflatus invites suspicion that the great man perhaps tended to force history into his own dramatic cast of mind. It was, however, as Churchill's man, his emissary (his "dogsbody" as the English say, or his gillie, as a Scottish laird might say) that Macmillan played a large, though unobtrusive role in the war. He had spent the first 21 exhausting but unrewarding months as parliamentary liaison man with various wartime ministries. He had survived the boredom of the phony war and a bomb in the Carlton Club that might have wiped out the Conservative Party. He dealt with such power brokers as Lord Beaverbrook and such heroes as the Earl of Suffolk (a descendant of Sir Philip Sidney), who appeared in Macmillan's office as an unshaven civilian desperado, having just performed the highly uncivil service of hijacking a cargo of industrial diamonds, French scientists, Norwegian heavy water, and American machine tools from under the German guns.

Lost Teeth. Macmillan draws on his diaries and seldom has to correct by hindsight his first impressions. They are not without humor, as in the episode involving Lord Davies, a Welsh magnate who was Macmillan's companion on a mission to Finland. Macmillan's diary records the event thus: "Lord Davies has left his teeth in the train. "Lord Davies has lost his passport.

"Later, Lord Davies' passport has turned up, but not his teeth. A search of an intense kind has been made. As the Malmoe train connects with the Berlin train, it is thought that the teeth have been stolen by a Gestapo agent. Later still. Lord Davies' teeth have been found." All, however, was not low jinks in high diplomacy. Churchill drew Macmillan closer to him, and the fact that both men had American mothers made it seem right that Macmillan would work better than most others in the vital area of Anglo-American cooperation. In this field, Macmillan won many of the battles. He grasped the essential point that an American commander in an Allied operation was better for Britain because Washington suspicions of British policy would then be diminished. In that respect, Macmillan's admiration for Eisenhower is unqualified.

Baneful Influence. If Macmillan won many battles of a military-diplomatic kind, it is sadly clear that he believes he lost the same military-diplomatic war. The Anglo-American conflict was over the grand question of what shape Europe would assume after the ultimate victory. Macmillan had seen the Poles left to defeat and noted Chamberlain's indifferent impotence with contempt and pity. Then, in mid-1944, he saw decisions made that reflected Franklin Roosevelt's obsessive desire to please Stalin and his "almost pathological suspicions" of British foreign policy, "especially in the Balkans."

Eight divisions and 70% of air strength were taken from the Italian campaign and diverted to a pointless landing in the south of France; this meant the end of hopes for an Allied occupation of Austria and influence in the Balkans. Macmillan mournfully charges that the Roosevelt policy, designed, with Stalin, to keep the Allies in the West, was "to exercise a baneful, and nearly fatal influence over the future of Greece." He notes that the postwar burden of correcting this "almost unilateral American decision [has] fallen largely on the American people . . . Thus were sown the seeds of the partition of Europe, and the tragic divisions which were to dominate all political and strategic thinking for a generation."

In one of the hundreds of psychological portraits of war figures, Macmillan thus characterized Mussolini's successor, Marshal Badoglio: "Honest, broadminded, humorous. I should judge of peasant origin." It might stand also as a fair self-portrait of the grandson of a Scots crofter.

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