> I never understood the praise for Churchill either. He was the broken
> clock that eventually showed the right time: a British imperialist,
> anti-German bigot who was eventually met with a situation where those
> views were useful.
Yes, but I think we must admit (1) when they were useful, they were enormously and uniquely useful: his oratorical ability, and the stopped-clock conviction behind it that allowed him to rally people in unbelievably bleak-looking times was probably one of the differences between victory and defeat; and (2) this is one of those cases where being right once outweighs everything else (in the eyes of his countrymen, if not the imperial subjects). It's kind of like the "you fuck one goat" joke in reverse. He saved his country from their worst possible nightmare. For that they understandably give him infinite credit.
Lastly, the fact that he was good at war and bad at peace might be more like a rule than an exception. Many people who have exactly the right virtues to win a war are ill-suited to managing peace. David Kaiser in his book on Vietnam makes the argument that most of what went wrong with the cold war stemmed from exactly that fact, that the virtues that made the WWII generation heroic and capable of winning were exactly the opposite ones needed for passing from war to detente: unbreakable belief in the rightness of their own cause; willingness to bear any sacrifice for any length of time without discouragement and without changing their long term goals; absolute distrust of every utterance of the enemy; and a belief that compromise was dishonorable.
> With heroes like that, you're doomed.
To be fair to the British, they pretty much agreed with you as do his specialist uses and tried to use him like a hired gun -- they voted him in when it was clear this was war and chucked him out of office almost before the guns were cold.
Michael