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To be fair to Churchill (and Lloyd George, another enthusiast for 'soft underbelly' strategies) the aim was to win the war less bloodily than by confronting the main enemy on the main battlefield.
In both wars, it failed. The first war was eventually won by assembling a continental-scale mass army and, after several well-known and horrific false starts, mastering the tactics of industrial age warfare on the western front.
The second war was won because, for three years, Stalin was prepared to accept most of the casualties*. (So long as he wasn't him, of course.)
When the allied armies opened the western front in June 1944 their casualty rate was at least as high as that of their fathers 30 years before.
A useful read is Gary Sheffield's Forgotten Victory (2001) ISBN: 9780747264606.

*This is not for a moment to trivialise 60,000 Bomber Command deaths in the air offensive; of course another Churchillian attempt to avoid the mass slaughter of the trenches.