ABSTRACT
Adolf Hitler stated that Churchill is the most bloodthirsty of amateur strategists that history has ever known. It was the combination of Churchill's experiences as a soldier and as a politician that gave lie to the Nazi leader's estimation of his British counterpart as an amateur strategist. Churchill returned in his study of Marlborough to the dominant influence the psychological aspect of grand strategy could have on the vertical continuum of war, even entitling one chapter of that biography, The Home Front. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Soviets incorporated the new perspective of the continuum of war into their military doctrine. The stalemate of the First World War drew Churchill to a variety of means by which decisive linkage could be restored to the continuum of war. The idea of such force multipliers, he discovered in his inter-war studies of his ancestor, were very much a part of the first Duke of Marlborough's military philosophy.
