I | INTRODUCTION |
Winston
Churchill (1874-1965), British politician and prime minister of the
United Kingdom (1940-1945, 1951-1955), widely regarded as the greatest British
leader of the 20th century. Churchill is celebrated for his leadership during
World War II (1939-1945). His courage, decisiveness, political experience, and
enormous vitality enabled him to lead his country through the war, one of the
most desperate struggles in British history.
Winston Churchill’s public life extended from
the reign of Queen Victoria in the late 19th century to the Cold War. During
this long political career, Churchill held every important cabinet office in the
British government, except foreign minister. Churchill was also known for the
many books on British history and politics he wrote throughout his lifetime. His
command of the English language not only made him a great orator but earned him
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953.
II | EARLY LIFE |
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at
Blenheim Palace, his family's ancestral seat in Oxfordshire, on November 30,
1874. He was the elder son of Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill, a British
statesman who rose to be chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of
Commons. His mother was an American, Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a New York
financier. Churchill inherited a family tradition of statesmanship that went
back to the great English general John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough,
in the 17th century. Young Winston attended Harrow School, on the outskirts of
London, where he was schooled in the classics. He was a precocious student and,
like his father, had a remarkable memory, but he was also stubborn. Churchill
had little interest in learning Latin, Greek, or mathematics. By his own
account, he considered himself such a dunce that he 'could learn only English.'
However, he said, 'I learned it thoroughly.'
From early childhood Churchill was fascinated
by soldiers and warfare, and he often played with the large collection of lead
soldiers in his nursery. His later years at Harrow were spent preparing to enter
the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, from which he graduated with honors.
Early in 1895 his father died; Churchill was only 20 years old. A few weeks
later Churchill was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen's Own
Hussars, a regiment of the British army.
III | WAR CORRESPONDENT |
In November 1895 Churchill spent his first
military leave on assignment for a London newspaper. He traveled to Cuba in
order to accompany the Spanish army, which was then attempting to stop a
rebellion. On his 21st birthday, which he spent in the Cuban jungle, he came
under fire for the first time. Later, after his regiment was sent to India in
1896, he secured a temporary transfer to the turbulent North-West Frontier,
where a tribal insurrection was under way. Churchill's dispatches to the
Daily Telegraph newspaper in 1897 formed the basis for his first book,
The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898).
In 1898 Churchill went to Egypt attached to
the 21st Lancers and took part in the reconquest of the Sudan. This area south
of Egypt had been controlled by Egypt prior to 1885, when it fell to a rebel
Muslim group. As Britain gained control of Egypt in the 1880s and 1890s, it
sought to reclaim the Sudan. During the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898,
Churchill participated in one of the last cavalry charges in British military
history. Again his newspaper dispatches were followed by a book, The River
War (1899) in two volumes, the most substantial work he wrote before
entering Parliament.
Churchill resigned his army commission in
1899 and turned to journalism and politics. He ran for a seat in Parliament as a
Conservative candidate but was not elected. He then went to South Africa to
cover the Boer War that had just broken out between Britain and the Boers,
descendants of Dutch settlers. He was captured by the Boers and imprisoned at
the State Model School in Pretoria. He managed to escape from prison and then
take the railroad into Portuguese East Africa, a feat that made him a national
hero. He then returned to South Africa and sought another army commission. He
fought and wrote about the war until he returned to London in the summer of
1900. His newspaper dispatches were promptly reprinted in two books, London
to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton's March
(1900).
IV | MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT |
When Churchill returned to England in 1900,
his South African exploits had made him famous, and he was elected to the House
of Commons. Though he was a Conservative, he criticized military spending and
supported free trade, which soon resulted in a conflict with the Conservative
leadership, who supported large military budgets and protective tariffs. In 1904
he 'crossed the floor of the House' to take a seat with the Liberal Party.
Churchill also continued writing. His
political ambition was evident in his sole novel, Savrola (1900), in
which the hero leads a democratic revolution in an imaginary country in the
Balkans, only to see the revolution escape from his control. During his first
years in Parliament, Churchill wrote a two-volume biography of his father,
Lord Randolph Churchill (1906)—an illuminating study of British
parliamentary government. His diligent research about his father's political
career helped him learn about British politics and prepare for cabinet
office.
After the Liberals won the election in 1905,
Churchill was appointed undersecretary at the Colonial Office, where he was the
minister responsible for issues concerning Britain’s colonies. One of his tours
to inspect colonies in East Africa resulted in another book, My African
Journey (1908). In 1908 he gained his first cabinet post as president of the
Board of Trade. That same year, Churchill married Clementine Ogilvy Hozier. They
had five children, one of whom died as a young child. In 1910 Churchill became
home secretary, with responsibility for police and the prison system. He held
this post until 1911, superintending liberal reforms of Britain's prison system
to reduce lengthy terms, to find alternatives to prison for youthful offenders,
and to distinguish between criminal and political prisoners.
V | WORLD WAR I |
In the years prior to World War I (1914-1918),
economic and political tensions grew among Britain, France, Russia, Italy,
Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. The British
government was concerned about the buildup of the German navy and believed that
war was inevitable. In 1911 Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith made Churchill
first lord of the admiralty, with a mandate to create a naval war staff and to
maintain the fleet in constant readiness for war. Churchill threw himself into
this task, developing heavier guns, faster battleships, and naval aviation.
As war clouds gathered in July 1914, Churchill
conducted a test mobilization of the fleet. When the test was over, he ordered
the fleet to remain concentrated in readiness. That decision meant that Britain
was prepared to act quickly when the war broke out. On July 28, after Austria
declared war on Serbia, the fleet proceeded to its war station at Scapa Flow,
Britain's principal naval base, located in the Orkney Islands in northern
Scotland. Within days, Britain joined the growing international conflict.
Throughout the war, the navy's presence in the North Sea dominated and contained
the German fleet.
In September 1914, distressed at the rapid
deterioration of Belgian resistance to the German invasion, Churchill rushed to
Belgium to help save the critical port city of Antwerp. He was unable to save
the city, but his intervention stiffened Belgian resolve and slowed the German
advance until Allied lines became firmer. This reduced the threat to Britain and
saved some territory from coming under German control. During this time,
Churchill realized that barbed wire and machine guns were not sufficient tools
to break the stalemate on the western front and he worked on developing armored
fighting vehicles (tanks) to break the deadlock and end the slaughter.
As the lines hardened on the western front,
Churchill focused on a campaign to force open the Dardanelles Strait, controlled
by the Ottoman Empire, to give the Allies a direct route to Russia through the
Black Sea. Such a move would bring much-needed supplies to the Russian armies
and eliminate the Ottomans from the war. When the naval attack faltered early in
1915, Churchill agreed to the War Office plan proposed by Horatio Herbert
Kitchener for a land campaign at the Gallipoli Peninsula on the Dardanelles.
However, delays, hesitations, and incompetent leadership in the field robbed the
campaign of success, and the Allies suffered great losses. Although the attack
was one of the few brilliant strategic ideas of the war, Churchill’s cabinet
colleagues withdrew their support for the idea as soon as Britain met
resistance, letting Churchill take the blame as scapegoat. Churchill later
concluded that, since he was not the prime minister, he had been wrong to make
himself responsible for the attack without having full power to carry it out
himself.
Because of the ill-starred Dardanelles
campaign, Churchill was demoted from the admiralty in May 1915 and given a minor
cabinet post. It was the greatest reverse to date in his political career, and
Churchill was filled with despair. His wife later told his biographer Martin
Gilbert, 'I thought he would die of grief.' In the difficult months that
followed his demotion, he began to paint, a hobby that brought him pleasure for
more than four decades.
In November 1916 Churchill resigned his
cabinet post and was given command of an infantry battalion in France. The next
spring he returned to his seat in the House of Commons. In May 1917 David Lloyd
George, who had replaced Asquith as prime minister, recalled Churchill to the
cabinet as minister of munitions, and for the rest of the war Churchill directed
industrial support of the war effort by organizing the national economy for the
efficient production of war materials.
VI | BETWEEN THE WARS |
After World War I ended in 1918, Churchill
was appointed to the War Office and then to the Colonial Office. However, in
1922, when the Conservatives returned to power, he was defeated at the polls and
was out of the House of Commons for the first time since 1900.
Churchill busied himself with writing The
World Crisis (1923-1931), his five-volume account of World War I. The
Liberal Party, though still important in parliamentary politics, had begun to be
eclipsed by the new Labour Party. Churchill made three unsuccessful attempts to
reenter the House of Commons, all the while edging carefully toward a return to
the Conservative Party. He finally won reelection in 1924, as a Conservative,
and for the next 40 years was never without a seat in the House of Commons.
Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin offered Churchill the important cabinet post of
chancellor of the Exchequer (national finance minister), which he held for the
next five years.
During the 1930s, when he held no cabinet
posts, Churchill lived at his countryseat at Chartwell in Kent and supervised a
literary factory of secretaries and assistants who helped him write hundreds of
newspaper articles and several more books. He wrote his autobiography My
Early Life (1930), which he called 'a story of youthful endeavour,' and two
books of essays, Thoughts and Adventures (1932) and Great
Contemporaries (1937). His most sustained writing project during these years
was the four-volume Marlborough: His Life and Times (1933-1938), which
political philosopher Leo Strauss called 'the greatest historical work written
in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and
understanding.'
As Churchill studied his forebear's work in
building and maintaining an alliance against the French king Louis XIV in the
early 18th century, he turned his attention to current politics and became one
of the most forceful and steady critics of the government. He organized
opposition to the plan to grant self-government to India, an unpopular stance at
a time when the British people wanted relief from the burdens of empire. Later,
he concentrated his efforts on opposing the dangerous rise of German military
power under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Because most Britons, as well as
the government, were focused on domestic affairs, Churchill's warnings about
Hitler went unheeded. When Baldwin became prime minister again in 1935,
Churchill was not given a cabinet post.
During the late 1930s Churchill’s national
popularity declined. In 1936 Churchill was a loyal supporter of King Edward VIII
in the controversy surrounding the king's romance with the American Wallis
Warfield Simpson, which led to his abdicating the throne. This support cost
Churchill heavily in public opinion and further divided Churchill from Prime
Minister Baldwin, who was pressing the king to abdicate. At the same time, he
continued his unpopular warnings about Germany and Hitler: His newspaper columns
were translated into many languages and widely published in Europe, then
gathered into a book called Step by Step (1939).
In 1937 Neville Chamberlain became prime
minister, and one year later Churchill denounced Chamberlain's Munich Pact,
which ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Meanwhile, Churchill worked on
secret government committees performing defense research. From various
informants he pieced together information about German intentions and
capabilities—particularly about the growing strength of the German air force, or
Luftwaffe, which posed a direct threat to Britain. He also encouraged the
development of radar, which helped the country detect activity in the sea or
air.
VII | WORLD WAR II |
World War II broke out in September 1939
when Germany marched into Poland. Britain and France responded to the invasion
of Poland by declaring war on Germany. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) and the United States joined the British and French war effort in 1941.
Chamberlain invited Churchill to become a member of his war cabinet. Churchill
was again first lord of the admiralty, and during the next eight months he did
his best to build up the navy, especially in the field of antisubmarine
warfare.
In 1940 the German attack on Norway ended
public confidence in Chamberlain. On May 10, the day the Germans launched their
surprise invasion of Holland and Belgium, Chamberlain resigned, and King George
VI asked Churchill to be prime minister. Labour and Liberal leaders readily
agreed to join Conservatives in a wartime coalition government. Churchill set
the tone of his leadership in his first report to the House of Commons, 'I have
nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.' It was only the first of
his stirring wartime speeches, which knit the country together and inspired
people around the world.
A | War Leader |
The story of Churchill's life for the next
five years is an integral part of the history of World War II. He was national
commander in chief, with direct control over the formulation of policy and the
conduct of military operations. He supervised every aspect of the war effort.
His first concern was to create the administrative machinery for the central
direction of the war. He set up a small personal staff of officers who also
served on the war cabinet secretariat, so that there was a close working
relationship between the war cabinet of ministers directly responsible for the
conduct of the war and the new office of the minister of defense, which
Churchill held himself.
Churchill took office just as Hitler's
armored legions were breaking into France. It soon became clear the French would
not be able to withstand the German assault. The French begged Churchill to send
fighter squadrons to help them, but Churchill decided that even those squadrons
would not be enough to save the French. In one of his hardest decisions, he
turned down the French request in order to preserve the planes needed for
Britain's own air defense.
In mid-June Churchill flew to France. He
presented a radical plan to unite France and Britain under one government with a
combined military, but the French refused it. On June 22 France surrendered to
Germany. Since Churchill could not risk having French warships added to the
German and Italian navies, he asked the French admiral to join the British fleet
or to let his ships be demobilized. When the admiral refused, the British sank
or disabled the French ships and seized any French ships in British-controlled
ports.
After the fall of France, the Germans
planned to mount a massive air assault against Britain, followed by invasion.
When the Battle of Britain began in 1940, the Royal Air Force suffered heavy
losses, but managed to turn back the powerful German air force. During the
German bombing raids on London, Churchill spent as much time as he could among
its stricken citizens.
Soon after becoming prime minister,
Churchill wrote to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressing Britain's
need for destroyers and aircraft. Roosevelt was able to send older destroyers
and to sell arms to Britain during the first year of the war, despite the United
States’s declared neutrality. After March 1941 the United States supplied
military and economic aid to Britain through the lend-lease program; this
support relieved Britain of some of the vast strain on her financial
resources.
In 1941 Germany invaded the USSR, and
although Churchill had always opposed the Communist regime, he offered to help
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. This meant diverting vital American weapons to a
country that might fall to the Germans. However, Churchill believed that even if
the Soviet armies were driven back to the Ural Mountains 'Russia would still
exert an immense and ultimately decisive force,' and he did not hesitate to put
his belief into action by sending supplies.
B | Atlantic Alliance |
In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt met
for the first time during the war. This meeting was the first of many historic
conferences between them, and from it emerged the Atlantic Charter declaring
mutual support between the United States and Britain. When the United States
entered the war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to concentrate on defeating Hitler in Europe.
They would maintain a defensive position in the war against Japan until they
could increase their naval presence in the Pacific Ocean. The two leaders
jointly headed the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) that was set up to direct the
war.
For a time Roosevelt generally adopted
Churchill's strategic ideas, such as the prime minister's insistence on invading
North Africa in 1942 instead of a cross-channel assault. After 1943, however, as
the United States became more powerful, Churchill was increasingly forced to
accept American-imposed war plans. In early 1945, during the last months of
Roosevelt’s life, the U.S. president ignored Churchill's warnings concerning
Stalin's ambitions to take over countries in eastern Europe. Roosevelt wanted to
work with Stalin for a peaceful postwar order and seemed more concerned about
the waning British Empire than the growing prospect of a Soviet empire. World
War II ended in 1945, first in Europe in May when the Germans surrendered to the
Allied powers, and then in the Pacific in August.
British general elections, postponed
during the war, were held in July 1945. The wartime coalition government had
broken apart after the defeat of Germany, and Churchill ran in the election as a
Conservative. The results were announced while Churchill was attending the
Potsdam Conference, the last conference between the United States, Britain, and
the USSR. Given Churchill's popularity as wartime leader, he did not expect to
be defeated. Churchill himself was reelected, but the Labour Party gained a
majority in Parliament because the British public opinion sought social and
economic reforms that the Conservatives had resisted. The electorate did not
wish to return to the slump and unemployment of the 1930s; they also blamed the
Conservatives for waiting too long to resist Hitler.
Churchill's place at the Potsdam
Conference was taken over by the new prime minister, Labour leader Clement
Richard Attlee. Churchill retired as prime minister in deep disappointment. When
his wife suggested that his party's defeat might prove to be a blessing in
disguise, he replied that, if so, it was certainly well disguised.
VIII | LATER YEARS |
After the Labour victory, Churchill began
rebuilding the shattered fabric of his party as leader of the opposition. He
delivered a series of speeches that encouraged Anglo-American solidarity and the
unity of Western Europe against the growing Communist threat. In 1946, in a
speech at Fulton, Missouri, he defined the barrier thrown up by the USSR around
the nations of eastern Europe as the 'iron curtain.' He began to write his
six-volume work, The Second World War (1948-1954), a comprehensive
first-person account of his wartime statesmanship.
In 1951 Churchill's efforts to revitalize
the Conservative Party were rewarded, and he again became prime minister. He
worked to reduce the danger of nuclear warfare, vainly seeking a summit
conference between the Soviet Union and the Western powers. In 1953 Queen
Elizabeth II conferred on him the Knighthood of the Garter, and he became Sir
Winston Churchill. In the same year he won the Nobel Prize for literature for
his historical and biographical works and for his oratory. In November 1954, on
Churchill's 80th birthday, the House of Commons honored him on the eve of his
retirement. In April 1955 he resigned as prime minister but remained a member of
the House of Commons.
In his retirement, Churchill worked on
completing A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-1958), a
four-volume work begun in the late 1930s but postponed during World War II. He
devoted much of his leisure in his later years to his favorite pastime of
painting, ultimately producing more than 500 canvases. The Royal Academy of Arts
featured his works in 1959. In 1963 the U.S. Congress made Churchill an honorary
citizen of the United States. Churchill died peacefully at his town house in
London, two months after his 90th birthday. Following a state funeral service
that was attended by dozens of world leaders at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, he was
buried near Blenheim Palace.
IX | CONCLUSION |
After Churchill died, Britons took stock of
their situation in the post-war era. In the last decades of his life, Britain
had virtually dismantled her empire. Many felt Churchill's passing represented
the end of Britain's status as a world power and his funeral marked the end of
British imperial glory.
Today some Britons regard Churchill as a
disturbing emblem of the old regime of class privilege and colonial empire.
Others admire his efforts to adapt the British tradition of self-government,
liberty, civility, and the rule of law to a new world made by democracy and
science in the 20th century. Churchill once wrote that 'a man's life must be
nailed to a cross either of thought or of action.' His own choice was clearly
the active life of politics and, at its climax, he led his country in its
'finest hour.'
British memorials to Churchill include the
establishment of Churchill College at Cambridge University, which houses
Churchill’s papers, and a prominent statue across from the Houses of Parliament
in London. His story is told in the official biography begun by his son Randolph
and completed by Martin Gilbert—the longest biography ever written about anyone.
Millions have toured his birthplace at Blenheim Palace, his house at Chartwell,
or the Cabinet War Rooms in London—places that evoke his memory and give
visitors a sense of the man.
But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that
Churchill himself was bigger than Britain. People are still fascinated by this
man who was “easily satisfied with the very best.” They marvel at his boundless
energy and his tremendous power of concentration. They are also struck by his
daily naps, his fondness for Harrow School songs, his witty remarks, his love of
animals, and his taste for cigars and Pol Roger champagne. Even after his death,
readers can consider his example as a statesman and his reflections in his
books.
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