Winston Churchill: The Last Lion Who Saved the World

There are moments in history when everything depends on one person.

Not often. History is usually made by forces larger than any individual — economic pressures, demographic shifts, the slow grinding of civilisations against each other over decades and centuries. Individual human beings rarely change its direction.

But sometimes they do. Sometimes one person, in one moment, makes a decision or gives a speech or simply refuses to give in when everyone around them is counselling surrender — and the whole course of human events turns on that refusal.

Winston Churchill was that person. In the summer of 1940, at the moment of Britain's greatest peril, when the most powerful military machine in European history stood forty miles away across the Channel and every rational calculation pointed toward negotiation and accommodation, Churchill said no.

That no saved the world. Literally. Completely. Without qualification.

He is the greatest Briton who ever lived. And a generation is growing up that has been taught to be ashamed of him.

The Making of Churchill

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire — the great baroque palace built for his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough, the general who had broken French power in Europe at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The palace itself was a statement of British military achievement. Churchill was born inside it. The symbolism is almost too neat.

His childhood was not happy. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a brilliant and erratic politician who regarded his son with something between indifference and contempt. His mother, the American beauty Jennie Jerome, was glamorous, socially brilliant, and largely absent. Churchill was raised principally by his nanny, Mrs Everest, whom he loved deeply and whose photograph he kept by his bedside for the rest of his life.

He was not a distinguished pupil. He struggled at Harrow, failed the entrance examination for Sandhurst twice before passing on the third attempt, and graduated from the Royal Military College near the bottom of his class. His father, who died in 1895 before he could see what his son would become, never expected great things from him.

He was wrong about almost nothing in his political career except his son.

The Soldier and the Writer

Churchill's early career was that of a man in an extraordinary hurry — a young man who had concluded, correctly, that he was destined for great things and was determined to accumulate the experience and reputation that would make them possible before time ran out.

He was a soldier and a war correspondent simultaneously — an unusual combination that was technically against the rules and that Churchill pursued regardless with characteristic disregard for regulations that inconvenienced him. He fought on the North West Frontier of India. He rode in the last great cavalry charge in British military history at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 — twenty one years old, in the 21st Lancers, charging the Dervish army in the Sudan. He was captured and made a dramatic escape during the Boer War, becoming famous across the Empire almost overnight.

And through all of it he wrote. Books, articles, dispatches — Churchill wrote continuously and brilliantly from his early twenties to his final years. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, not as a consolation prize for an old statesman but because he was genuinely one of the great prose stylists of the English language. His history of the English-speaking peoples, his memoirs of the Second World War, his biography of his ancestor Marlborough — these are works of literature as well as history, written by a man who understood that the way you tell a story matters as much as the story itself.

He entered Parliament in 1900 as a Conservative MP. He crossed the floor to the Liberals in 1904. He crossed back to the Conservatives in 1924. He held almost every great office of state — Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary of State for War. He made catastrophic errors — the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, which he championed and which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, haunted him for decades. He held deeply unfashionable views on India. He was wrong about Edward VIII and the abdication crisis.

He was a complicated, flawed, sometimes infuriating man of enormous gifts and significant blindspots. He was also, in the summer of 1940, exactly the right person in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. And he knew it.

The Wilderness Years

Through the 1930s Churchill was a political outcast. He had left government in 1929 and spent the decade on the backbenches, warning anyone who would listen — and very few would listen — about the nature of the threat posed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

He was dismissed as a warmonger. An alarmist. A man whose judgment had been permanently discredited by Gallipoli, rattling an old sabre for the sake of relevance. The appeasement policy pursued by Neville Chamberlain had the support of the political establishment, the press, and a public that had lived through the First World War and would do almost anything to avoid repeating it.

Churchill watched, wrote, warned, and waited. He was sixty years old in 1934. Sixty five in 1939. By any reasonable assessment his political career was over.

Then the war came. And everything changed.

May 1940

On the 10th of May 1940 — the same day Germany launched its devastating assault on France and the Low Countries — Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

He had not been the obvious choice. Halifax — the Foreign Secretary, the establishment candidate, a man of impeccable credentials and conventional judgment — was preferred by the King, by much of the Conservative Party, by those who believed that negotiation with Hitler, however distasteful, was the only rational course available.

Churchill was preferred by nobody except the Labour Party, whose support was essential for the wartime coalition, and by the logic of the situation itself — which demanded not a negotiator but a fighter.

On the 13th of May he addressed the House of Commons for the first time as Prime Minister. He had been in office three days. France was collapsing. The British Expeditionary Force was retreating toward the Channel. The situation was as close to hopeless as it is possible for a situation to be.

He stood up and said this:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

The House was silent. Then he continued:

You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

In the Cabinet room, in the days that followed, Halifax pressed for negotiations with Hitler through Mussolini. Churchill refused. He is reported to have said, in a private moment: If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

There would be no negotiation. No accommodation. No surrender.

That decision — made by one man, in a Cabinet room in Whitehall, in late May 1940 — changed the war. Because if Britain had negotiated, there was no base from which America could have fought. No platform from which the liberation of Europe could have been launched. No allied victory in 1945. The consequences of a British accommodation with Nazi Germany in 1940 stretch into a darkness that is impossible to fully imagine.

Churchill refused to go there. He refused on behalf of all of us, including the generations not yet born.

The Speeches

Churchill understood something that very few political leaders have ever understood — that words are weapons. That in a moment of national crisis, the right words delivered in the right way can change what people believe is possible, and that changing what people believe is possible changes what is actually possible.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

This was their finest hour.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

These were not merely inspiring phrases. They were acts of political will — statements of intent so clear and so absolute that they made the alternative unthinkable. They told the British people what they were doing and why, and the British people believed him because he meant every word.

Edward R. Murrow — the great American journalist who broadcast from London throughout the Blitz — said of Churchill that he mobilised the English language and sent it into battle. That is precisely right. The speeches were weapons. They won battles.

The Man Himself

Churchill was not a saint. He was a man of his time and class and Empire, with all the limitations that implies. His views on India, on race, on the British Empire's right to govern subject peoples — these were the views of a Victorian imperialist and they were wrong in ways that matter and should be acknowledged.

But here is what also needs to be said: the man who held those views also spent the 1930s as the only major British politician who understood clearly what Hitler was, what Nazism was, what the consequences of appeasement would be. The man who was wrong about India was right about Germany when almost nobody else was. The man whose imperial views were of his time was the man who saved European civilisation from a tyranny that made the British Empire look benevolent by comparison.

He was complicated. He was human. He was irreplaceable.

The End

Churchill was voted out of office in July 1945 — before the war against Japan had even ended, before the victory he had worked for had been fully secured. The British public, with a pragmatism that is very British, decided they wanted a welfare state and a Labour government rather than the man who had saved them, and they voted accordingly.

Churchill was devastated. He returned to government in 1951 and served as Prime Minister until 1955, when age and declining health finally forced him from office. He died on the 24th of January 1965, aged ninety, fifty years to the day after the death of his father Lord Randolph.

His state funeral was the largest in British history. Leaders from around the world came to London to pay their respects. As his coffin was carried up the Thames on a barge, the dockside cranes dipped their jibs in salute — a spontaneous gesture by the crane operators of the London docks, working men honouring the man who had kept their country free.

He lies in the churchyard of St Martin's in Bladon, Oxfordshire, a short walk from Blenheim Palace where he was born. A simple grave. His name, his wife's name, the dates.

The greatest Briton who ever lived, buried in a Oxfordshire village churchyard.

Go and find it. Stand there. Think about what he did.

Then think about the people who want to tear down his statues.