Lincoln and Churchill

Lewis E. Lehrman examines two great wartime leaders. An excerpt:

President Lincoln’s English-speaking counterpart during the 20th century was surely the great war leader and statesman Winston Spencer Churchill. Churchill, too, had a war strategy which encompassed all aspects of his struggle against Hitler and the Japanese Empire. His bodyguard Walter H. Thompson wrote of a visit during World War II by Prime Minister Churchill to the naval base at Scapa Flow:

He pointed to the impressive fake battleship that was on the far end of the northern string and told one of the warrant officers that it would be spotted by German pilots as a dummy and that they would not waste a bomb on her. “But she’s not even been spotted by our own reconnaissance, sir,” he was told. “Then they need spectacles!” “How so, sir?” “No gulls about her!’ he snapped. “No seagulls. You’ll always find gulls about a living ship. But not around a dummy. Not unless you drop garbage for the dummy too. Keep garbage in the water day and night, bow and stern, of all these dummies! Feed the gulls and fool the Germans!” And they did.