No military conflict has ever generated more incredible ideas, more technical advances, and more scientific leaps than the Second World War. In the cauldron of ideas that bubbled away between 1939 and 1945, new inventions ranged from jet engines to roll-on roll-off ferries, from flying wings to floating tanks, from miniature radios to guided missiles. Prime Minister Winston Churchill immersed himself in the work of his engineers and inventors, his soldiers, sailors, and airmen, imprinting his own personality on the machines that were created in his name. He called this the ‘Wizard War’, and the scientists who contributed so many new and original ideas were often affectionately referred to as ‘boffins’. Like no other British leader at a time of war, Churchill relished military debate and immersed himself in the work of the mavericks who were needed to get the best out of Britain’s sometimes very low-key war effort.
Churchill had a lifetime of experience of the military. He had trained at Sandhurst, and served in the cavalry in India and Sudan in the 1890s. He worked as a war reporter during the Boer War in South Africa, where he was captured and escaped. He was First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915 and, in the first half of 1916, he commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. He wrote literally millions of words in the 1930s as a military historian and biographer of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. Military affairs were, almost, embedded in his DNA. This enabled him to say, when appointed Prime Minister in May 1940, as war ravaged France and the Low Countries, and his own country faced its biggest threat in centuries, that his ‘whole life had been a preparation for this hour and this trial’.
But Churchill was no great respecter of senior Army or Navy officers. He thought many of them were unimaginative, too reliant on repeating standard tactics and procedures, and had their minds closed to new ideas. As we saw earlier in this series (see MHM 140, June/July 2024), he had played a significant part during the First World War in the invention of the tank – a machine intended to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. He remembered for years how negative and dismissive senior Army figures initially were of this revolutionary new piece of military hardware. Churchill really valued unorthodox thinking – thinking ‘outside the box’, as it would be called today.
