LAURENCE REES: And the single best leader of the war?

ROBERT SERVICE: I think there’s no doubt about it that Churchill was a towering figure in the Second World War, far more able to raise morale, than, say, Stalin was. Soviet morale was battered by Stalin who was, in many ways, a counterproductive leader. He behaved far more brutally than he needed to do in order to secure the support of the Soviet people. The greatest rallyer of the Soviet war effort wasn’t Stalin, it was Hitler.

The atrocities conducted by the Germans did far more to stiffen Soviet national resistance than anything else. Roosevelt was a very able leader in as much as he eventually got the Americans into a war that had to be fought, and that was a very fine job, but he never had an enemy combatant on his soil, he never had his cities bombed, and I think that Churchill’s record in the Second World War is glorious.