On occasion he would regale his entourage with speeches he would have given if he had been in the House of Commons at different periods of history. He would spend up to thirty hours memorizing his speeches and constantly practice them to make them word perfect, and would even make up ones he was not about to give but might be called upon to deliver sometime in the future. Churchill had a photographic memory, and not just for music-hall songs and Shakespeare. Few plan Bs in history have been so successful.įor planning in particular and for leadership in general a good memory is useful, or failing that an excellent filing system. It was this plan B that featured the famous sickle-cut maneuver, in which concentrated armor cut the Allies off from their supply bases, the Maginot Line was skirted, the mountainous Ardennes forest-hitherto thought impassable-was used as a conduit, and the Germans broke through at Sedan in six days and reached the Channel coast at Abbeville in only ten. When the first set of plans fell into Allied hands by accident only days before the assault was due to be launched, Erich von Manstein drew up a new one. “Planning is everything.” It is often forgotten that one of the most successful war plans in modern history-Hitler’s blitzkrieg against the West that succeeded in knocking out France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland in six weeks in May and June 1940-was not the original one. “Plans are worthless,” agreed Eisenhower. “It was not always obvious, but he never really thought of anything else but the job in hand.”Ī leader’s ability to plan meticulously is important, despite Moltke’s dictum that few plans last beyond the initial contact with the enemy. “Concentration was one of the keys to his character,” recalled James Stuart, Winston Churchill’s chief whip. Churchill was undoubtedly energetic, and yet he often did not get out of bed until noon-and that was for a hot bath-although he had been hard working on his papers since before breakfast.
Energy is an almost demonic attribute, hard to characterize, and takes many forms. Similarly, he was able to work almost throughout his two major bouts of pneumonia during the war. Churchill melded his life entirely around his job during the Second World War, taking only eight days’ proper holiday in the whole six years of conflict, six of those spent fishing in Canada and two swimming in Florida, but even on the latter trip he was attended by his red ministerial boxes and he read all the newspapers. Many of the greatest leaders in history have been workaholics-Churchill is perhaps the most famous, though Margaret Thatcher, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, and Marshal Ivan Konev are other examples.
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