I'm not nearly as harsh about it. He got some impressively big stuff wrong, and right. Above all he wasn't afraid to act. Above all, that's what was needed righ

I'm not nearly as harsh about it. He got some impressively big stuff wrong, and right. Above all he wasn't afraid to act. Above all, that's what was needed right then. He'll always be controversial for his more extreme examples of being wrong. Such is what seems to make a great general or wartime leader. More he was a wartime YC - he backed all sorts of clearly idiotic ideas, and a few of them turned out to be platinum. Would Lord Halifax, Chamberlain or Atlee (or worse May, Johnson or Corbyn) have poured the equivalent of billions into tanks that were crucial in WW1, or into Bletchley that turned out to be the golden goose, or radar? Nope, almost certainly not, they'd have all have died as unproven too, and we'd probably have lost. An aircraft carrier made of ice is clearly an absurd idea. Yet if it had closed the Atlantic gap, as intended, millions of tons of shipping would have been saved.