Churchill

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This is the penultimate biography of Churchill. It develops quite deeply into Churchill, the man, the adventurer and the statesman. It needed over 1000 pages, and probably more could have been written.

🎨 Impressions

Great men gather divisive

Churchill was an imperialist, leave no doubt about that. He lived for the British empire.

✍️ My Top Quotes

In the courageous and often lonely stands he was to take against the twin totalitarian threats of Fascism and Communism, he cared far more for what he imagined would have been the good opinion of his fallen comrades of the Great War than for what was said by his living colleagues on the benches of the House of Commons.
‘We shape our buildings,’ Winston Churchill was later to say, ‘and afterwards our buildings shape us.’
Like a true aristocrat, he was no snob. ‘What is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth?’ he wanted to ask Adolf Hitler of the Jews.
Churchill’s next political memory was the death of Disraeli in April 1881, when he was six. ‘I followed his illness from day to day with great anxiety,’ he recalled, ‘because everyone said what a loss he would be to his country and how no one else could stop Mr Gladstone from working his wicked will upon us all.’
At this distance of time it is impossible to tell whether Churchill’s bad behaviour had genuinely warranted punishment, or whether Sneyd-Kinnersley’s craving to hurt children was more to blame, but before Churchill was ten years old the beatings had so damaged his health that his parents took him away from St George’s and sent him to a far kinder school in Hove, run by two sisters both called Miss Thomson.
He had earlier opposed Gladstone’s bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 as too much of a ‘Forward’ imperialist policy, yet only four years later he went further.
Lord Randolph meanwhile, when he was not in the Commons or the Carlton Club, spent a good deal of time in Paris, where people presumed he was womanizing. ‘Tell Mary she is a fool not to forgive Billy,’ he once wrote to Jennie about two of their friends. ‘What does one occasional cook or housemaid matter?’
Asked what he intended to do as a profession, he replied, ‘The Army, of course, so long as there’s any fighting to be had. When that’s over, I shall have a shot at politics.’
‘I am always ready to learn,’ Churchill was to say in 1952, ‘although I do not always like being taught.’
Her hypocrisy can be measured precisely: in the seven years from 1885 to 1892, Churchill wrote to his parents seventy-six times; they to him six times. The huge majority of Churchill’s letters were not asking for anything, except, between the lines, for love and attention.
When the seventeen-year-old Churchill tried to get out of being sent to a French family to learn French over Christmas 1891, Jennie wrote, ‘I have only read one page of your letter and I send it back to you as its style does not please me.’
‘my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius.’105 He continued in this delusion for several years, until he was told that his father had in fact merely thought he was not clever enough to become a barrister, let alone a help in his political career.
‘A medal glitters,’ he once wrote, ‘but it also casts a shadow.’
‘To understand a man,’ Napoleon once said, ‘look at the world when he was twenty.’
As long as the individual’s commanding officer agreed and his military duties were not impaired, officers were permitted to write about campaigns for the newspapers, although it was not actively encouraged.
The key was the ‘noble’ English sentence. Once Churchill had discovered that he was capable of writing vividly to the right length under tight deadlines in war zones, he demanded ever higher rates and within five years he was the world’s best-paid war correspondent.
Have never seen his like,’ Churchill wrote in the early 1930s, ‘or in some respects his equal … He was pacifist, individualist, democrat, capitalist and a “Gold-Bug” ’ (advocate of the Gold Standard).
Was not true, as Lord Mountbatten was later to claim, that ‘He left Cuba with three great predilections for the whole of his life – active service, siestas, and cigars.’
It was in Bangalore that he learned to admire what he later called the ‘great work that England was doing in India and of her high mission to rule these primitive but agreeable races for their welfare and our own’.
Today, of course, we know imperialism and colonialism to be evil and exploitative concepts, but Churchill’s first-hand experience of the British Raj did not strike him that way. He admired the way the British had brought internal peace for the first time in Indian history, as well as railways, vast irrigation projects, mass education, newspapers, the possibilities for extensive international trade, standardized units of exchange, bridges, roads, aqueducts, docks, universities, an uncorrupt legal system, medical advances, anti-famine coordination, the English language as the first national lingua franca, telegraphic communications and military protection from the Russian, French, Afghan, Afridi and other outside threats, while also abolishing suttee (the practice of burning widows on funeral pyres), thugee (the ritualized murder of travellers) and other abuses.
There would not be much satisfaction in being styled “Your Insignificance” or “Your Squalidity”.’
Throughout his life he enjoyed depicting himself as a heavy drinker, but it is remarkable on how few occasions anybody else thought him to have been drunk.
Yet it is extraordinary how many of his greatest Second World War speeches conform to each of the five elements of this seminal essay, written more than forty years earlier. Well-chosen words; carefully crafted sentences; accumulation of argument; use of analogy; deployment of extravagances: those were the five scaffolds of the rhetoric of the greatest orator of his age.
‘Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.’
He believed their insistence on a rigid form of Islam kept the Afghan people in ‘the grip of miserable superstition’.
Islam, he further stated, increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis [anti-infidel fanatics] – as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such.
Churchill saw Islamic fundamentalism up close. It was a form of fanaticism that in many key features – its sheer implacability, contempt for Christianity, opposition to liberal Western values, addiction to violence, demand for total allegiance and so on – was not unlike the political fanaticism that he was to encounter forty years later.
It is said that most first novels are at least partly autobiographical,
‘A European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors. Democracy is more vindictive than Cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.’
Ivor Guest opined that ‘Few fathers had done less for their sons. Few sons have done more for their fathers.’
Churchill nonetheless ensured that Britain retained control of large tribal areas such as Basutoland (modern-day Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana) and Swaziland (eSwatini), where the native populations were treated in a more benevolent fashion than they had been by the Boers.
More than 50,000 Chinese workers who were being exploited by mine-owners in South Africa to such an extent that several Liberal newspapers and politicians freely used the term ‘Chinese slavery’.
Despite his insistence that it not be called slavery, Churchill unequivocally denounced the treatment of the Chinese workforce in South Africa, calling it ‘as degrading, hideous, and pathetic as any this civilized and Christian nation has made itself responsible for in modern years’.
Having met the Kaiser in 1906, and again in 1909, helped guard him against the mistake made by a number of British politicians, of thinking that Adolf Hitler was simply another version of the petulant Emperor.
‘Winston is full of the poor, whom he has just discovered,’ Masterman wrote to his wife Lucy at this time. ‘He thinks he is called by Providence to do something for them.’
Lloyd George supposedly told the Mastermans that he had asked Churchill whether Diana was a pretty child. ‘ “The prettiest child ever seen,” said Winston beaming. “Like her mother, I suppose?” “No,” said Winston still more gravely, “she is exactly like me.”
Whitehall wags put it, McKenna wanted six dreadnoughts, Lloyd George and Churchill wanted four, so the Government compromised on eight.
Nearly all the cases of murder are a combination of love and drink.’
‘Winston thinks with his mouth,’ meaning that he adopted policies because they sounded good in speeches.
Much of the strength of his reputation in the period up to 1940 rested on the fact that he had ‘got the Navy ready’ for the outbreak of the Great War. Yet in the process he also made powerful enemies in an institution with intimate ties to the Conservative Party and much influence throughout the Establishment.
In June 1912, Churchill asked Fisher to return to the Admiralty as his most senior adviser. ‘You need a plough to draw,’ he told him, mixing his metaphors magnificently. ‘Your propellers are racing in air.’
To the diehards who complained about his violating naval traditions, he is said to have rejoined, ‘Naval tradition? Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash.’23 (When this famous list is cited, prayers are sometimes omitted.
Although there was in fact no chance whatever that an independent Ireland would remain loyal to the Crown in the long run, Churchill’s mind was starting to move along the lines that were to climax with his suggestion of joint Anglo-American citizenship at Harvard in 1943.
In fact, male suffragists gave more trouble than Irish Loyalists, and ‘Winston threatened to smash the face of one of the male tormentors who forced his way into their compartment on the train.’
‘The question seems no longer to be “Should women have votes?” but “Ought women not to be abolished altogether?”
Unfortunately, the very next day her husband sounded exactly like the kind of person she had been satirizing, telling Sir George Riddell, ‘The truth is that we have enough ignorant voters and we don’t need any more.’
The rift between the parties was deepened in the summer of 1912 by the revelation that Lloyd George, still chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney-General, had bought shares in the American Marconi Company without declaring them for a full four months after telling the Commons that they did not have shares in its sister-company, the British Marconi Company, where Isaacs’s brother was managing director.
Asked if he would rejoin the Tories, he said, ‘No, certainly not! On no account. I am a Free Trader, and quite out of sympathy with their attitude to the working classes.’
After dinner at the Admiralty, Churchill was asked by a French naval delegation if they could have another naval base in the Mediterranean. ‘Use Malta as if it were Toulon,’ came the reply.
Criticism is always advantageous. I have derived continued benefit from criticism at all periods of my life, and I do not remember any time when I was ever short of it. Churchill, House of Commons, November 19142 Churchill embarked on the Great War like a dynamo.
One of the soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, a thirty-two-year-old Captain Clement Attlee of the South Lancashire Regiment, believed all his life that, as he put it, ‘the strategic conception was sound’.
Fisher sent the Prime Minister a long list of conditions, including the removal of HMS Queen Elizabeth from the Dardanelles and Churchill from the Admiralty, adding that the First Lord was ‘a bigger danger than the Germans’.
Kitchener, who had not been involved in the machinations to remove him, told Churchill ‘in the impressive and almost majestic manner that was natural to him, “Well, there is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The Fleet was ready.”
When in the Second World War an MP disgraced himself, Churchill suggested that he join a bomb-disposal unit as the best way of regaining people’s regard.
Attlee was convinced that the Dardanelles strategy had been a bold and correct one, which, in the view of one of his biographers, ‘gave him his lifelong admiration for Churchill as a military strategist which contributed enormously to their working relationship in the Second World War’.
Captain Clement Attlee of the 6th Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, became the last man but one to leave Suvla Bay.
On 17 January, Churchill and Jack Seely attended a lecture for senior officers on the lessons of the Battle of Loos. Afterwards the organizers asked what was the lesson of the lecture. ‘I restrained an impulse to reply “Don’t do it again,” ’ Churchill told Clementine. ‘But they will – I have no doubt.’
‘It was found that if a man was put in front of Winston for some misdemeanour he would ask them if they had fought at Loos,’ Gibb noticed. ‘If the answer was in the affirmative the Colonel would dismiss the charge. Inevitably, word got around and before long everyone in the battalion claimed to have fought at Loos.’
Early February saw another lucky escape when a shell exploded ‘at no great distance’ from him while lunching at Laurence Farm with Archie Sinclair and others.
When the new Government was announced, The Times reported that it had learned ‘with relief and satisfaction that Mr Churchill will not be offered any post in the new administration’.
‘A fifth of the resources, the effort, the loyalty, the resolution, the perseverance vainly employed in the battle of the Somme to gain a few shattered villages and a few square miles of devastated ground’, he told the Inquiry, ‘would in the Gallipoli Peninsula, used in time, have united the Balkans on our side, joined hands with Russia, and cut Turkey out of the war.’
‘Of all the tyrannies in history, the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst,’ Churchill said shortly after the war,
‘My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practise in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.’
One in ten British men between the ages of twenty and forty-five had died in the war, some 744,000, as well as 14,600 merchant seamen, and 1,000 civilians. A further 150,000 Britons died of Spanish influenza that winter. Against such a background, any fresh military commitments were not going to be popular.
As soon as the war ended, Churchill immediately set about writing The World Crisis. It was to be packed with lessons for the future. ‘No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion,’ he wrote. ‘No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.’
When Churchill told the Cabinet in August that ‘militarily, we are in a good position to fight the Triple Alliance,’ it was not a troika of foreign enemy powers he was talking about, but the mining, railway and dock trade unions.
‘What a magnificent body of men, and never to look forward to another drink!’
‘One might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.’
Churchill described Bolshevism as ‘That foul combination of criminality and animalism’.
‘Bolshevism is not a policy,’ he said in a speech on 29 May; ‘it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence. It presents all the characteristics of a pestilence. It breaks out with great suddenness; it is violently contagious; it throws people into a frenzy of excitement; it spreads with extraordinary rapidity; the mortality is terrible.’
‘But Winston in those days could be very irritating, in fact his stenographer [at the War Office] … got so exasperated with him that she threw her shorthand-book at him. Needless to say she got the sack.’
The Whites committed anti-Semitic pogroms quite as often as the Reds, and Churchill tried to make the military aid contingent upon Denikin ‘preventing by every possible means the ill-treatment of the innocent Jewish population’.
At the time there were 80,000 Jews in Palestine and 600,000 Arabs, so any possibility of such a Jewish homeland there seemed a long way off.
Although he also wanted to establish a homeland in northern Iraq for the Kurds – ‘to protect the Kurds from some future bully in Iraq’, as he put it – that plan was overruled by the Foreign Office.
They stopped at Gaza, where a Palestinian mob cheered Churchill and Great Britain. As Coote recorded, ‘Their chief cry over which they waxed quite frenzied was “Down with the Jews”, “Cut their throats”
That August, Collins was killed in an ambush by anti-Treaty forces. Shortly before his death he had told a friend who was going to London, ‘Tell Winston that we could never have done anything without him.’
Balfour said it was ‘Winston’s brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe
‘My father had very strong views about no animal being slaughtered for food once he had said “Good morning” to it.’ Of a particular goose he said, ‘You carve, Clemmie. He was a friend of mine.’
‘What a swine this Mussolini is,’ Churchill wrote to Clementine in September 1923.
Lord Randolph Churchill had been an undistinguished chancellor of the Exchequer, who referred to decimal points as ‘those damned dots’. Economics was not his son’s forte either
In 1945, Churchill admitted privately, ‘The biggest blunder of my life was the return to the Gold Standard.’
‘Fancy cutting down those beautiful trees we saw this afternoon’, Churchill said outside Quebec, ‘to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it Civilization.’
‘Cultured people’, his father replied, ‘are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production.’
‘We realize one hundred million pounds sterling a year from our liquor taxes,’ Churchill told the Appleton Post-Crescent newspaper, ‘which I understand you give to your bootleggers.’
Mayo’s paeans to the ways the British were attempting to educate the Untouchables, prevent cruelty to animals and improve medicine – all worthy projects regularly stymied by Hindu religious leaders – increased Churchill’s antipathy to Indian independence.
In late August he almost met Hitler in Munich, when the Nazi Party publicist, Harvard-educated Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl, tried to arrange an encounter between the two men. ‘Herr Hitler,’ Hanfstaengl said to his leader in his apartment, ‘don’t you realize the Churchills are sitting in the restaurant? … They are expecting you for coffee and will think this a deliberate insult.’ Hitler was unshaven and had too much to do. ‘What on earth would I talk to him about?’ he asked. It probably would not have been a very fruitful conversation, as Churchill sent an oral message via Hanfstaengl: ‘Tell your boss from me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.’
‘I remember the tears pouring down his cheeks one day before the war in the House of Commons,’ Attlee recalled many years later, ‘when he was telling me what was being done to the Jews in Germany.’
‘Herr Hitler, whatever one may think of his methods,’ opined The Times, ‘is genuinely trying to transform revolutionary fervour into moderate and constructive effort and to impose a high standard of public service on National-Socialist officials.’
‘If there is going to be war – and no one can say that there is not – we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.’
‘Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism
Churchill said exasperatedly to his son, ‘Randolph, do not interrupt me while I’m interrupting.’
Because of this changed stance, Churchill was no longer seen as an enemy in Russia and his effigy was discreetly taken down from the shooting gallery in Moscow’s Park of Culture and Rest.
‘The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that when nations are strong they are not always just, and when they wish to be just they are often no longer strong,’
One of the reasons why Churchill became prime minister in 1940 was that, although few had heeded his speeches, many others remembered that he had made them.
Churchill asked Bernstorff how to prevent a second German war. ‘Overwhelming encirclement,’ he replied.
One of the minor changes he suggested to Lawrence of Arabia was that ‘You can hardly talk of arousing the Arabs to a Crusade, which were things instituted to do them in. Jehad is the real word.’
Churchill made it clear that the Palestinian Arabs’ decision to take up arms for their imperial masters the Turks and refusal to participate in the Arab Revolt had destroyed any sympathy he might have had for them. ‘These Arabs were a poor people, conquered, living under the Turks fairly well,’
‘Of course, you are ambassador and your words have to be taken cum grano salis [with a pinch of salt].’
The idea that Churchill might be genuinely motivated by conviction seems not to have occurred to Chamberlain, who tended to see politics in intensely personal terms, a trait that was ultimately to lead to his downfall.
The extra year that Munich ‘bought’ for peace was put to good use by Germany; one-third of the tanks used in the invasion of France were of Czech manufacture.
‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’
Churchill said, ‘Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word “No”. Let that not be the epitaph of the English-speaking peoples or of Parliamentary democracy, or of France, or of the many surviving liberal states of Europe.’
In fact the campaign the Nazis unleashed that very night – known to history as Kristallnacht – was against the Jews. Eight thousand Jewish shops and 1,688 synagogues were ransacked, 267 synagogues were burned down, nearly a hundred Jews murdered, thousands beaten up and 30,000 sent to concentration camps.
There is a fascinating dichotomy in that, although the appeasement movement was intended to prevent another war breaking out, most of its leaders had not seen action in the Great War, whereas most of the anti-appeasers had.
‘If Franco won, his Nazi backers would drive him to the same kind of brutal suppressions as are practised in the totalitarian states.’ Franco did not need Hitler’s encouragement to massacre up to 100,000 of his Republican enemies when he duly won in March 1939.
Churchill had discovered beyond doubt how fundamentally unsound the ex-King was about the Nazis. He remained respectful throughout this ‘prolonged argument’, but did point out to him that ‘When our kings are in conflict with our constitution, we change our kings.’
On 30 January in the Reichstag, Hitler described Churchill, Duff Cooper and Eden as ‘apostles of war’. He also openly promised ‘the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’ should war break out.
Supposing (as I do not for one moment suppose) that Mr Kennedy were correct in his most tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat, rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men.
Churchill’s ‘face had ceased smiling’, Spears recalled, ‘and the shake of his head was ominous when he observed … that it would be very unwise to think the Ardennes were impassable to strong forces … “Remember,” he said, “that we are faced with a new weapon, armour in great strength, on which the Germans are no doubt concentrating, and that forests will be particularly tempting to such forces since they will offer concealment from the air.” ’ The French disbelief that any such attack was possible reminded Spears of an occasion in 1915 when Churchill had tried to explain his theory of ‘land cruisers’ (that is, tanks) to a French general, who found it absurd, and who, after he had left, said to Spears, ‘Your politicians are even funnier than ours.’
When Corbin tried to speak of ‘technical difficulties’ in declaring war, Churchill retorted, ‘I suppose you would call it a technical difficulty for a Pole if a German bomb fell on his head!’
Chamberlain wrote to Ida from Chequers, ‘What I hope for is not a military victory – I very much doubt the possibility of that – but a collapse of the German home front.’ It was hardly the right mentality for the man who was leading Britain into war.
He told the Admiralty that he would be arriving later in the afternoon to take up his office, whereupon the Board signalled to the Fleet: ‘WINSTON IS BACK’. Some captains, such as Lord Louis Mountbatten commanding the destroyer HMS Kelly, found the message inspirational, while others took it more in the nature of a warning that a ball of energy was about to burst upon them.
As soon as he assumed office, Churchill began to write regular letters to Chamberlain, thirteen in the first six weeks, covering every aspect of the war, which as a member of the War Cabinet he had every right to do. Chamberlain complained of their length, and said, ‘Of course I realize that the letters are for the purpose of quotation in the book that he will write hereafter.’
The height of absurdity in what was called the Phoney War – the eight-month period after the war started but before any fighting began between the British and Germans on land – came when the RAF was prevented from bombing targets in the Black Forest because so much of it was private property.
‘Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest,’ Churchill said, and he freely admitted, ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key.
When it was suggested that Randolph didn’t have enough money to marry, Churchill shot back, ‘What do they need? Cigars, champagne and a double bed.’
‘I haven’t the slightest doubt that he’s marrying because he thinks it’s time and right that Winston must have a grandson.
‘There are two people who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot,’ he said. ‘You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.’
‘Is everything you tell us true?’ a young rating asked Churchill on board a battleship in 1940. ‘Young man,’ Churchill replied, ‘I have told many lies for my country and will tell many more.’
Churchill quipped to Jock Colville, then Chamberlain’s private secretary, ‘If I were the first of May, I should be ashamed of myself.’ Colville, who at this time admired Chamberlain and was sceptical about Churchill, acidly recorded in his diary, ‘Personally I think he ought to be ashamed of himself in any case.’
Despite the litany of errors, there were some consolations from the Norway campaign. Whereas the Royal Navy had lost an aircraft carrier, two cruisers, a sloop and nine destroyers, Germany had lost three cruisers, and ten of her twenty-two destroyers and her only two operational battleships were damaged, much greater losses proportionately to the size of her navy than Britain’s. An intact German Navy fighting off Dunkirk the following month could have been a decisive force, but in early May the Germans had only one large cruiser, two light cruisers and seven destroyers ready for immediate service, not enough even to come out of port.
The men of destiny do not wait to be sent for; they come when they feel their time has come. They do not ask to be recognized, they declare themselves; they come like fate; they are inevitable.
Chamberlain soldiered on through a long, self-exculpatory and uninspiring defence of his Government and himself. ‘I do not think that the people of this country yet realize the extent or the imminence of the threat which is impending against us,’ he said, whereupon one MP called out, ‘We said that five years ago!’
The time-honoured practice of throwing loyal colleagues to the wolves having failed, Chamberlain called Halifax over to No. 10 at 10.15 a.m., without telling him that Amery had been offered his job.
His hero Napoleon believed that success was its own justification. In the idiom of the day, Churchill had ‘form’ in pushing for office going back thirty years, so why should it be any different with the highest office, which he had coveted for even longer?
Churchill admired Attlee’s authority, helpfulness, dispatch and lack of opportunism; he remembered it for years and it sealed the respect he had for him.
To explain the rapid rout of the massive French Ninth Army, one of Gamelin’s staff officers pointed out that the figures given for ‘mobilized’ men had included large numbers of postmen, railway workers and municipal employees who had been carrying on their civilian duties and had been mobilized only on paper, leaving Churchill further aghast.
He had not appreciated the extent to which the losses of the Great War and the social and political crises of the 1930s had sapped military morale.
When Italian ciphers were broken in July 1941. The Bletchley code-breakers – as many as 10,000 men and women by the end of the war – were, as Churchill put it, ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs’ and who, just as importantly, ‘never cackled’.
During the militarily disastrous Black Week in the Boer War, Queen Victoria had said, ‘We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.’ Churchill had three copies of that quotation made, which he now placed along the Cabinet table.
He said that if he did ever have to make such a speech, it would end with the words: ‘The hour has come; kill the Hun. He also intended to use the phrase, ‘You can always take one with you.’
On 30 May, he told Gort that once no further organized resistance was possible at Dunkirk he was ordered to ‘capitulate formally and to avoid useless slaughter
Mussolini declared war on Britain and France on 10 June. When Colville woke Churchill from his afternoon nap to give him the news, the Prime Minister growled, ‘People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in future.’
This decision not to commit the remainder of British air forces to France, despite overweening pressure from his ally and his own Francophilia, was one of the most critical judgements he ever made.
Chamberlain went to update the King on ‘what is being done to his Empire’, and the tricolour was flown over Westminster Abbey for the only time in history. ‘Who knows,’ Colville joked, ‘we may yet see the “fleurs de lys” restored to the Royal Standard!’ He thought the new country might be called ‘Frangland
‘He had to be rude to the British in order to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet,’ he wrote.
For all her insight and moderating tendencies, Clementine could sometimes be very tart herself. Colville observed that she ‘considers it one of her missions in life to put people in their place and prides herself on being outspoken’.
‘Up til April they were so sure the Allies would win that they did not think help necessary,’ Churchill told Lothian in Washington. ‘Now they are so sure we shall lose that they do not think it possible
In a paraphrase of another remark of Queen Victoria’s in Black Week during in the Boer War, he ended, ‘No one is downhearted here.’ Despite all the setbacks of recent days, his determination was unaffected.
Churchill exploded and ‘told him if he did not mind his own business he would perhaps have no business to mind!’
Cabinet set up the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, after weeks of inter-departmental wrangling, ‘to coordinate all action, by way of subversion and sabotage, against the enemy’. ‘And now,’ Churchill told Hugh Dalton, its first director, ‘go and set Europe ablaze!’ Churchill disliked Dalton personally, but thought him effective, and approvingly dubbed him ‘the Minister for Ungentlemanly Warfare’.
By total contrast with Churchill, Hitler virtually stopped making broadcasts once the war started going badly. During the whole of 1944, for example, he spoke on German radio only once.
It was hard to see how British strategic interests were served by aiding Greece, but on being informed that Athens had been bombed Churchill replied without hesitation, ‘Then we must bomb Rome.’ (‘Rome will not be unbuilt in a day,’ he told a Tory MP.
With Roosevelt safely re-elected, Churchill sent him a telegram on 16 November that he later described as ‘one of the most important I ever wrote’, asking for arms to be lent or leased to Britain under a programme whereby Britain would repay the United States over the very long term. (Even he would probably not have guessed that the final instalment of the loan, of $83.25 million, would only be repaid in 2006.
Cripps could not be moved from Moscow as ‘He is a lunatic in a country of lunatics, and it would be a pity to move him.’
Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff, ‘Prince Paul’s attitude looks like that of an unfortunate man in a cage with a tiger, hoping not to provoke him while steadily dinner-time approaches.’
Smoking a cigar that he relit at least ten times, and drinking ‘quite a lot of port and brandy’, he pointed out that the Germans had rejected Hitler twice in free elections, the second time by a bigger majority than the first. Eade was impressed by the informality of the lunch.
Discussing scientific matters, probably for Conant’s benefit, Churchill asked the Prof why, if it ‘is constantly halving itself, is there any uranium left on earth?’
He was right; the destruction of Poland at the hands of both the Nazis and Soviets was cataclysmic. Between 1939 and 1945, the population of Poland declined by 17.2 percent, more than that of any other European country.
Hitler’s secretary, Christa Schroeder, recalled that ‘emotion would take over’ when he dictated to her about three subjects – Roosevelt, Churchill and Bolshevism. ‘His voice often skipped over bits’ as a result. ‘Then his choice of words would not be so fussy,’ she wrote.
Churchill told Prytz that the knob of butter was ‘the impending clash between the U.S.S.R. and Germany’. In that event, he said, ‘To crush Germany I am prepared to enter into an alliance with anyone, even the Devil!’
Yet Churchill’s view ‘was that Russia was now at war; innocent peasants were being slaughtered; and we should forget about Soviet systems or the Comintern and extend our hand to fellow human beings in distress’. Colville recalled that this argument ‘was extremely vehement’.
Churchill said that after victory ‘There should be an end to all bloodshed, though he should like to see Mussolini, the bogus mimic of Ancient Rome, strangled like Vercingetorix in old Roman fashion.’ Hitler and the leading Nazis would be sent to a remote island, though not St Helena, as that would ‘desecrate’ Napoleon’s memory.
On the train back to London, Churchill asked for a Benedictine liqueur, and ten minutes later for a brandy. Reminded by the attendant that he had already had a Benedictine, he said, ‘I know; I want some brandy to clear it up.’
Britain had sent 720 ships to the Soviet Union in forty convoys, and had delivered over four million tons of supplies, 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft. These convoys diverted fleets that would otherwise have been used to protect home waters or Atlantic convoys.
By the end of the war, Britain had sent 720 ships to the Soviet Union in forty convoys, and had delivered over four million tons of supplies, 5,000 tanks and 7,000 aircraft.
On 25 August, with the Germans outside Kiev, Britain and Russia jointly invaded Iran with a small force. They were victorious in three days, and the Shah’s son was installed in his father’s place on the Peacock Throne. Britain was now able to supply Russia by land, and to protect the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Abadan oilfields. ‘We had been doing something for which we had justification but no right,’ Churchill admitted privately.
Churchill told Colville that ‘So far the Government had only made one error of judgment: Greece.’ He now blamed that campaign on Sir John Dill. Colville knew that the Greek campaign had in fact been Churchill’s idea and that Dill had initially opposed it, but the Prime Minister ‘has now got his knife right into Dill and frequently disparages him’.
The following day Churchill made light of the criticisms, telling his fellow MPs, ‘There was a custom in Imperial China that anyone who wished to criticize the Government had the right to … and, provided he followed that up by committing suicide, very great respect was paid to his words, and no ulterior motive was assigned. That seems to me to have been, from many points of view, a wise custom, but I certainly would be the last to suggest that it should be made retrospective.’
The ‘Fighting Brookes’ of Colebrooke and Fermanagh had served in the British Army since the English Civil War: no fewer than twenty-six of them had fought in the Great War and twenty-seven would fight in the Second World War.
He was to tell Moran that ‘every month’ of working with Churchill ‘is a year off my life’.
Churchill went on to say, ‘To me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, have drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.’
By the end of 1941, Britain was spending more than half her Gross Domestic Product on the war, but that was soon to be dwarfed by the American contribution. In 1940, the United States produced less than half the amount of munitions produced by the United Kingdom, in 1941 it was two-thirds, in 1942 twice as much, in 1943 nearly thrice and in 1944 almost four times the amount.
Asked why Canada had not expelled the Vichy Ambassador, he replied, ‘A courtyard likes to have a window.’ Of Rudolf Hess he said, ‘He tells us that Hitler loves England and that his heart would bleed for us if Germany had to invade Great Britain.’ He played it carefully when asked whether it was vital to the war effort that Roosevelt remained president, saying, ‘After a long experience of public life I have come to the conclusion that very few understand the politics of their own country – and none the politics of other countries
Gandhi was fortunate that it was the Viceroy who ruled India rather than Hitler; the Führer’s advice to Lord Halifax when they met at Berchtesgaden in 1937 had been ‘Shoot Gandhi.’
That day starving Malta, which had endured her thousandth air raid the previous December, was finally reached by two merchantmen, the Talabot and the Pampas, which escaped German bombers and provided supplies that allowed the island to fight on,
On the rare occasions when they used the Annexe air-raid shelter, Pamela slept on the top bunk and Churchill, snoring so powerfully it made the metal bunk-bed shake, slept on the bottom, while Clementine sensibly stayed in her own room.
On 5 May, he wrote of a report from Libya, ‘What is the meaning of the expression “Failed to silence machine-gun posts”? It seems an odd description of an action. Evidently what happened was merely a skirmish. Surely the way to silence machine-guns is to bring up some guns and shell them.’ Brooke, a Royal Artilleryman and acknowledged expert, who was one of the officers credited with inventing the ‘creeping barrage’ in the Great War, did not appreciate being lectured on such matters, not least because he knew Churchill knew that it was impractical always to call up artillery to deal with a troublesome machine gun.
At the War Cabinet meeting on 1 June, however, Pound had to report that a convoy from Iceland to Russia had been very heavily mauled. Of its thirty-five ships, six had been sunk by bombers and one by a U-boat, with the overall loss of 147 tanks, thirty-seven aircraft and 770 vehicles.
On the second day of the debate, Aneurin Bevan, a high-living left-wing Labour MP for whom Bracken coined the phrase ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’, woundingly remarked, ‘The Prime Minister wins debate after debate, and loses battle after battle.
The belief that the Tirpitz, then the largest battleship afloat, was on its way towards the Anglo-American PQ17 convoy, ordered its thirty-five ships to scatter. Pound feared that otherwise Tirpitz ‘would have sunk every single vessel within an hour or so’. Yet the intelligence was wrong, and the Tirpitz was not in the area, whereas German bombers and U-boats were. No fewer than twenty-three vessels, comprising 118,000 out of the convoy’s 200,000 tons of shipping, were sunk. Four hundred tanks and 210 planes went to the bottom of the sea.
The Defence Committee cancelled the August convoy, but the September one lost twelve ships out of forty. For the next two years, convoys ran only during the winter months, resulting in fewer losses.
Energetic soldier … If he is disagreeable to those about him, he is also disagreeable to the enemy.’
The discussions, often over tables ‘groaning with food and drink’, were not confined to the war. At one point Churchill asked Stalin what had been his most anxious moment in his career, to which Stalin replied the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. ‘What happened to the kulaks?’ Churchill then asked, of the millions of richer peasants who had been killed during that process. ‘There was not even the flicker of an eyelid,’ Cadogan recalled. ‘He [Stalin] turned and with a nonchalant wave of the hand said, “Oh! They went away.”
Flight of ten thousand miles through hostile and foreign skies may be the duty of young pilots,’ the American General Douglas MacArthur, himself a Medal of Honor holder, was to say of Churchill’s London–Moscow journey, ‘but for a statesman burdened with the world’s cares it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valor.’
On 9 September Churchill was informed that the Indian Congress Party would offer only passive resistance should the Japanese invade the sub-continent, and would not help the British to defend it. ‘I hate Indians,’ Churchill apparently told Amery. ‘They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’
Churchill has rightly been castigated for remarks such as these, but the many encomia he paid to the Indian Army – at 2.5 million, the largest all-volunteer army in history – have tended to be ignored, along with the fact that he did continue to protect India with British Army divisions that could have been put to very good use elsewhere. ‘The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, Moslem and Hindu alike,’ he said, and their ‘glorious heroism’ in campaigns from Abyssinia and North Africa to Burma and Italy, ‘shine forever in the annals of war’.
Churchill’s sights were now on Italy. ‘When a nation is thoroughly beaten in war it does all sorts of things which no one can imagine beforehand,’ he told the War Cabinet on 22 November. The Combined Chiefs of Staff were not yet thinking in terms of an Italian mainland campaign, but Churchill was, and had been since his four memoranda of the previous year. He saw it as a way of drawing German resources away from the beaches of north-west France.fn2
Roosevelt had grown to loathe de Gaulle for his French chauvinism, his habit of constantly giving priority to French interests over Allied ones and his attempts to sabotage US–Vichy relations. ‘De Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France,’ the President told his son Elliott. ‘I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more.’
When, on another occasion, Bracken said that de Gaulle regarded himself as a reincarnation of St Joan, Churchill growled, ‘Yes, but my bishops won’t burn him!’
All, 793 German U-boats were destroyed or captured in the Second World War; of the nearly 40,000 men who served on them, three-quarters died at sea.
The nonchalance with which Stalin had dismissed the ‘disappearance’ of the kulaks at their meeting in Moscow meant that, however much Churchill may have been shocked, he could not have been entirely surprised. ‘The atrocities by Lenin and Trotsky are incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale, and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser himself is responsible,’ Churchill had written back in 1919. But now their equally brutal successor was a vital ally.
While Churchill was staying at Roosevelt’s mountain retreat in Maryland, known as Shangri-La (present-day Camp David),
A year after the first thousand-bomber raid, on Cologne, Churchill was starting to have doubts about the saturation-bombing policy. He was shown a film at Chequers in late June made by the RAF of the bombing of Wuppertal in Westphalia and asked afterwards, ‘Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?’
He commissioned a judge, Sir John Singleton, to produce a report on the bombing policy, which eventually called for more of an emphasis on strategic bombing rather than the carpet-bombing of cities.105 German cities continued to be smashed night after night, however, a campaign that severely restricted the increase in the war-materiel production of the Third Reich, at the total cost of over 55,000 Bomber Command airmen. ‘Even when most ill,’ Doris Miles wrote to her husband of Churchill, ‘he would ring up Bomber Command in the early hours of the morning to find out how many casualties we had (not how many bombs had been dropped) and how many planes had got back safely.’
Eden characterized the Jewish position as ‘You clear out and we’ll settle with the Arabs.’ Amery added that the Government ‘Can’t be stampeded by Jewish extremists.’ Cranborne argued that the ‘Jews and Arabs were both playing off against us.’ Wavell’s view was that ‘From the point of view of security of the British Empire, the present aspirations of Jews in Palestine are a real menace to our position in the Middle East and subsequently in India.’
In the calendar year 1943, when 70,000 Western servicemen, including bomber crews, died fighting Germany, two million Russian soldiers were killed, nearly thirty times the number.
Churchill’s policy of doing everything possible to keep the Soviet Union supplied, even at the inadvertent cost of Singapore, had clearly been the correct one. Yet, as Ian Jacob pointed out in a lecture to the Royal United Services Institute after the war, ‘There was little or no communication of facts or ideas and we had no real idea of Russian military thinking. The fundamental Russian distrust of the West, which was temporarily allayed by the German attack on Russia and our immediate response to it, very soon re-established itself and prevailed throughout. Fortunately, the almost complete geographical separation of the Russian theatre of war mitigated these disadvantages.’
Another quadrupedal gift that year, though this time living, was Rota, a fully grown lion, given by a Mr and Mrs Thompson, which Churchill gave to the London Zoo. ‘If there are any shortcomings in your work I shall send you to him,’ he said to one of his humourless civil servants. ‘Meat is very short now.’ (The man took him seriously and reported that the Prime Minister was ‘in a delirium’.) When Churchill visited Rota at the zoo in August 1943, he also went inside the swan enclosure, telling the swans, ‘I suppose you would like to feed me.’
In July 1943, the Germans had twelve divisions in Italy and the Balkans, which by the end of the year had grown to more than thirty.
Churchill held forth on one of his favourite subjects, the many benefits of the British Empire for its native peoples.
The military situation was made all the more difficult by Gandhi’s campaign to force the British to quit India, which he did not end despite the imminent Japanese threat.
By the end of 1944, one million tons of grain had been secured from Australia and the South-East Asia Command, which has led some to conclude that without Churchill the Bengal Famine would actually have been worse. One historian of the famine has concluded that ‘Far from seeking to starve India, Churchill and his Cabinet sought every way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort.’
The next day, Chamberlain’s black cat at No. 10, the Munich Mouser, was found dead in the Foreign Office. ‘Winston says he died of remorse and chose his deathbed accordingly,’ recorded Eden.
In early March, in a ‘benevolent but sombre mood’, he admitted to his guests at Chequers that he was disturbed by Stalin’s attitude over Poland, saying that he felt like telling the Russians, ‘Personally I fight tyranny whatever uniform it wears or slogans it utters.’
At lunch at the Annexe on 1 June, there was an extraordinary series of exchanges between the King, his private secretary and the Prime Minister. In light of the advice of Ramsay and the others, the King said that neither of them should go. Churchill countered that he could not recommend to the Cabinet that the King should go, but that he himself was certainly going. When Lascelles told Churchill that the King would find it hard to find a new prime minister in the midst of a major invasion of France, Churchill replied, ‘Oh, that’s all arranged for,’ presumably referring to the sealed letter that he and the King had written proposing Eden as his successor. Lascelles then argued that constitutionally Churchill could not leave the country without the King’s consent, to which Churchill argued that as he would be on a British ship he would not actually be abroad. Lascelles pointed out that the ship would be outside British territorial waters, so in fact he would be.
Seems extraordinary, but even on the eve of D-Day, four years after de Gaulle had set up the Free French in London, the leaders of both Britain and the United States felt such distrust of him. But they detested his French chauvinism and genuinely feared that he might try to turn France into an anti-Western Gaullist dictatorship after the war.
The first of 9,521 V-1f rockets started to land on Britain on 13 June. Nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ and ‘buzz-bombs’, they forced Churchill back into the Annexe again. On 8 September, the first of around 1,500 V-2 rocket-bombs landed on southern England, continuing until March 1945. Flying at 3,580mph, the V-2 struck without warning with a one-ton payload that could destroy entire streets. Together, the V-1 and V-2 killed 8,938 British civilians and 2,917 servicemen, seriously injured 25,000 people and destroyed 107,000 homes in London and the south-east.
Then, referring to the three American Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, ‘The Arnold–King–Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen.’
Churchill supported the Jewish Agency’s requests for public exposure of the deportations. ‘I am entirely in accord with making the biggest outcry possible,’ he told Eden.44 Radio broadcasts were made about Auschwitz, and Hungarian railway workers were warned in Hungarian that they were committing war crimes and would be punished.45 The warnings were repeated by the BBC in October: ‘If these plans are carried out, those guilty of such murderous acts will be brought to justice and will pay the penalty for their heinous crimes.’46 However, the long-range bombing of Auschwitz and its railway lines needed to be done in daylight, and the USAAF, which undertook daylight raids, refused Churchill’s request on 26 June and on several subsequent occasions.
‘Unfortunately AE is immovable on the subject of Palestine,’ Anthony Eden’s private secretary Oliver Harvey wrote in his diary in April 1943, for example. ‘He loves Arabs and hates Jews.’
Moscow set up a Polish Committee for National Liberation at Lublin in late July, a puppet government in direct opposition to the legitimate Polish Government-in-exile in London. Two days later, the Poles of the Warsaw Home Army, who were loyal to the London Government-in-exile, staged an uprising in the Polish capital against the Wehrmacht garrison, a desperate, sixty-three-day struggle for liberation. By the end, the men were virtually wiped out and the women and children were taken to extermination camps. Stalin halted his forces outside Warsaw to allow the Germans to destroy the Home Army, denouncing the Uprising’s leaders as ‘criminal adventurers’ and refusing to allow Allied aircraft landing rights to resupply them. Churchill contemplated suspending aid convoys to Murmansk in protest, but decided against it. ‘Terrible and even humbling submissions must at times be made to the general aim,’ he later wrote.
The next day, after another difficult meeting, Brooke wrote, ‘I find it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that three-quarters of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other quarter have no conception what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again … Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent.’
A settlement between the London and the Lublin Poles would be hard to achieve without the active support of the Roosevelt Administration, but it was such a sensitive subject in American politics given the millions of Polish-American voters that an early accord was unlikely, in which case ‘We shall have to hush the matter up and spin it out until after the presidential election.’ That is exactly what happened.
On 24 January 1945, Churchill told Colville that it was half a century since his father’s death. Colville wondered what Lord Randolph, his son Winston and his grandson Randolph all had in common, and decided it was their undeniable ‘capacity for being utterly unreasonable’.
With omnipresent flies and midges, Churchill called Yalta ‘the Riviera of Hades’.
Great pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion,’ but territory in the west that was ethnically and historically German was nonetheless added to Poland, and remains there to this day. By 1950, between twelve and fourteen million Germans had moved from those historically German territories to lands behind the new German border, the largest movement of people in modern European history.
Between 18 May and 2 June 1945, the 1st Guards Brigade, part of the British V Corps that occupied Carinthia, the southern province of Austria, and several other British units handed over some 40,000 anti-Soviet Cossacks to the Red Army, including many who were not Soviet citizens and never had been. Similarly, though in this case there was no treaty obligation to do so, 30,000 Yugoslavs who had fought against Marshal Tito were sent to him. Most of these Cossacks and Yugoslavs were liquidated on arrival; the rest were incarcerated and cruelly punished for years. For the Foreign Office officials involved, suggests the historian of the British culpability for these events, ‘The fate of the Russians whose return they enforced was an unfortunate but unavoidable sacrifice to the greater aim.’
He was in much the same mood when he reported to the King on his trip. ‘Was Stalin’s word to be trusted or not?’ the King noted after their lunch. ‘That remains to be proved but we must try it out.’
On 27 March, the day the last V-2 rocket fell on London, Churchill saw off Clementine, who was now president of the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund, on a long journey to the Soviet Union.
That same day, he learned that fourteen Polish leaders representing non-Communist political parties, including the heroic General Kazimierz Okulicki, one of the former commanders of the Home Army, had been arrested by the Red Army near Warsaw, despite written guarantees of safe conduct. After weeks of silence it transpired that they were going to be put on trial in Moscow. If there was any one moment when Churchill was forced to recognize that Stalin had simply been lying to him at Yalta, and there was likely to be a rift with Russia after the German surrender, it was then. He described it in his memoirs as ‘this sinister episode’.
Diplomatic relations with Russia deteriorated still further when Stalin accused the British and Americans of conducting secret negotiations with the Germans at Berne in Switzerland, when in fact all Alexander had done was to inform Kesselring of how to go about surrendering unconditionally. Stalin’s distrust and paranoia were obvious.
‘What is now Hitler’s best course?’ Churchill asked a lunch party at Chequers in early April, suggesting that the Führer might try to fly to Britain like Rudolf Hess and say, ‘I am responsible; wreak your vengeance on me but spare my people.’ At this, the Duchess of Marlborough retorted that ‘In such a case the only course would be to take him back and drop him by parachute over Germany.’
Churchill asked Clementine to ‘express to Stalin personally my cordial feelings and my resolve and confidence that a complete understanding between the English-speaking world and Russia will be achieved and maintained for many years, as this is the only hope of the world.’ When she presented Stalin with a gold fountain pen as a gift from Churchill, he ungraciously replied, ‘I only write with a pencil.’
Churchill did not invent the term Iron Curtain, which had been around since 1918 and had appeared in a book Philip Snowden’s wife Dame Ethel Snowden wrote about Bolshevism in 1920, but he stored the evocative phrase away in his extraordinarily capacious memory for a quarter of a century, before deploying it to maximum effect in 1946.
Although the Soviet Union suffered over 90 per cent of the casualties of the Big Three Powers, Churchill did not want the Americans to behave as if Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship had some sort of moral equivalency with the Western democracies. Truman nonetheless went ahead and met Stalin privately.
Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.
Churchill kept up a constant fire against socialism and the Labour Party in Parliament, mocking the Government’s rationing regime as a ‘Queuetopia’. ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ he said in a debate in October.
‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow … The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.
The reaction was immediate and almost unanimously denunciatory. Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s widow, pronounced herself outraged. Trygve Lie, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the British Ambassador to the UN that the speech had played into the hands of anti-Western elements in Moscow. The Democrats in the US Congress were furious. The press, not just on the left, was overwhelmingly negative in both Britain and America, let alone elsewhere. More than a hundred Labour MPs signed a motion denouncing the speech.
‘Great peoples forget sufferings, but not humiliations.’
Everyone will have equal rights in Heaven. That will be the real Welfare State.’
In a debate on foreign affairs in January 1948, Churchill had declared, ‘For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.’
I hope you have all mastered the official Socialist jargon which our masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word ‘poor’; they are described as the ‘lower income group’. When it comes to a question of freezing a workman’s wages, the Chancellor of the Exchequer speaks of ‘arresting increases in personal income’ … There is a lovely one about houses and homes. They are in future to be called ‘accommodation units’. I don’t know how we are to sing our old song ‘Home Sweet Home’. ‘Accommodation Unit, Sweet Accommodation Unit, There’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.’ I hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their
He still dominated the Cabinet, now more Buddha than Achilles. John Colville on Churchill’s second premiership
Over Suez, Churchill profoundly disagreed with Eden, who believed that Britain should cede the Canal Zone unilaterally to foster good relations with Egypt.
On his note that was placed on top of the King’s coffin, Churchill wrote the words ‘For Valour’, the rubric of the Victoria Cross.
On the question of whether the Army should adopt Belgian, British or American automatic rifles, Sir William Slim said, ‘I suppose we shall end up with some mongrel weapon, half-British and half-American.’ ‘Pray moderate your language, Field Marshal,’ said Churchill. ‘That’s an exact description of me.’
‘My views are a harmonious process which keeps them in relation to the current movement of events.’
‘Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant and venomous things that are said, but on the whole we would rather lump them than do away with it.’
‘I want no criticism of America at my table,’ Churchill said at a lunch at No. 10. ‘The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.’
Churchill even attacked Bevan when he wasn’t directly involved in a particular issue: when recalling his own suggestion in 1949 that Communist China should be recognized, Churchill said, ‘If you recognize anyone it does not mean that you like him. We all, for instance, recognize the right honourable Gentleman the Member for Ebbw Vale.’
On 8 January, Churchill had dinner at the British Embassy in Washington with President Truman, who had less than two weeks left in office. He made a pro-Zionist speech, which practically all the Americans present disliked, though they admitted to Colville ‘that the large Jewish vote would prevent them disagreeing publicly’.
On 15 October Churchill learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. ‘Is that you, Anthony?’ he telephoned Eden in Paris. ‘How are you? I thought you would like to know that I have just been awarded a Nobel Prize.’ Then, after a pause and a chuckle, he added, ‘But don’t worry, dear, it’s for Literature, not for Peace.’
Churchill enjoyed inviting visitors to Chartwell; on one occasion he offered a whisky and soda to a Mormon, who replied, ‘May I have water, Sir Winston? Lions drink it.’ ‘Asses drink it too,’ came the reply.
Another Mormon present said, ‘Strong drink rageth and stingeth like a serpent.’ ‘I have long been looking for a drink like that,’ Churchill retorted.
‘I get my exercise as a pall-bearer to my many friends who exercised all their lives,’ he said.
Churchill published The Birth of Britain, the first of four volumes of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which Clement Attlee suggested should really have been entitled, ‘Things in History Which Have Interested Me’.
No fewer than 112 countries were represented; only Communist China refused to send a representative, and only the Republic of Ireland failed to broadcast the funeral live.
Have known finer and greater characters, wiser philosophers, more understanding personalities, but no greater man. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Churchill, December
I have known finer and greater characters, wiser philosophers, more understanding personalities, but no greater man. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Churchill,
In 1960, when he started writing his memoirs, Lord Ismay told President Eisenhower that an objective biography of Churchill could not be written until at least the year 2010.
‘To do justice to a great man,’ Churchill himself wrote, ‘discriminating criticism is necessary. Gush, however quenching, is always insipid.’
Should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.’
Churchill’s written output was similarly immense. He published 6.1 million words in thirty-seven books – more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined – and delivered five million in public speeches, not counting his voluminous letter- and memorandum-writing. Partly because he was such a polymath and so prolific, he also seemed to be a mass of contradictions.
‘I’ve done a lot of foolish things that turned out well, and a lot of wise things that have turned out badly,’ he said in his CBS interview in New York in March 1932. ‘The misfortune of today may lead to the success of tomorrow.’