Lightning In His Brain

THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL; ALONE: 1932-1940

by William Manchester

Little, Brown; 756 pages; $24.95

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, VOL. VIII: NEVER DESPAIR 1945-1965

by Martin Gilbert

Houghton Mifflin; 1,438 pages; $40

What will historians say about Winston Churchill a hundred years from now? The question is pertinent -- inescapable, in fact, because nearly a quarter- century after his death, we may remain too close to make an accurate judgment. Of all the larger-than-life figures of World War II -- Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini -- Churchill remains the hardest to assess. Rarely has a great leader been so often right. Or so often wrong.

The second volume of William Manchester's projected triple-decker biography covers the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, when Churchill was indisputably right. Out of power and derided as a crank, he sounded the alarm about the terrible plot being hatched inside Hitler's deranged mind. The story is familiar, but, told with skill and vivid anecdotes by Manchester, it continues to shock and horrify. Four times, by Churchill's count, firm action could have stopped Hitler without a shot's being fired; four times Britain's leaders, along with their counterparts in France, ignored or willfully misinterpreted the evidence: Hitler was hungry, and he planned to have Europe for dinner.

If the Abwehr, Germany's secret service, had placed agents in key positions in London, it could not have chosen better than, to name just two, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and his successor, Neville Chamberlain. Indeed, Nazi moles would not have dared to undermine Britain's defenses, diplomatic as well as military, as blatantly as did those two ambitious bumblers. After Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936, Baldwin rejected pressure to appoint Churchill as Minister of Defense with the compelling logic that "if I pick Winston, Hitler will be cross." In 1938, after meeting the Fuhrer, the deluded Chamberlain could say, "I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word."

Manchester ends his narrative in June 1940, when even Chamberlain had to admit his error, when France had fallen and the new Prime Minister, Churchill, addressed his imperiled country with an eloquence that was an army in itself. "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: 'This was their finest hour.' "

Yet even then Hitler had influential admirers in London, and without Churchill's fierce spirit and dominating personality, it is quite possible that Britain would have made peace with him, perhaps changing the outcome of the war and modern history.

Martin Gilbert begins the eighth and final volume of his study -- at 9.2 million words, the longest biography in history -- several years later, just after the victory over Germany. By then Churchill was beginning to talk about the Soviet threat, which seemed to him as menacing as that of Germany ten years before. "An iron curtain is drawn down upon ((the Soviet)) front," he wrote President Truman. "We do not know what is going on behind."

The story is carried on through Churchill's 1945 defeat at the polls, the writing of his war memoirs, his second term at 10 Downing Street in the early '50s and, finally, his death at 90 in 1965. Gilbert's is the official biography, a day-by-day chronological account that seems to leave out nothing important and includes much that is not. Looked at on its own terms, it is an admirable monument to the great man, meticulously researched, scrupulously documented and well -- or well enough -- written.

But while it tells all, Gilbert's final volume tells it mainly from Churchill's viewpoint. Like the installments that preceded it, Never Despair gives little indication that, as his early critics noted, Churchill was often "a genius without judgment," a man with "a zigzag streak of lightning in the brain." As Manchester aptly observes, Churchill and his archenemy Hitler were alike in more ways than either would have cared to admit: both were brilliant orators capable of inspiring millions; both possessed wills of almost superhuman intensity; and both were meddlesome war leaders who constantly second-guessed their generals and set back their causes as often as they advanced them.

Fortunately for the Allies, Churchill's mistakes, such as his decision to sacrifice thousands of British troops in a futile defense of Greece in 1941, were less disastrous than Hitler's, which cost him the war. But Churchill survived to write his own sometimes misleading history, which, until recently, has set the tone for many historians. Perhaps Manchester's final volume will help put both him and his role in better perspective.