Churchill's Greatness
Winston Spencer Churchill remains the preeminent giant of the 20th century. A soldier, journalist, statesman, orator, and historian, Churchill continues to capture our attention some 70 years after his death.
Churchill grew up in the shadow of his distant and often cruel father, Randolph Spencer Churchill, whom he admired and emulated throughout his long and productive life. Sent to live at Harrow, an elite boarding school from age 5 onwards (a common practice among Victorian-era aristocrats), Churchill once remarked that “famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood”. Churchill’s parents rarely visited him at Harrow, and letters from his father contained more rebukes and criticism than warmth. “The stern compression of circumstances”, Churchill wrote, “the twinges of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years, are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished”. Churchill’s mother, the American-born socialite Jeanette, was, to her son, “like the evening star… I loved her dearly but at a distance”. Churchill believed that greatness awaited him all his life, telling a childhood friend that he would one day be called upon to save his country. A graduate of Sandhurst, Churchill fought on four continents before his 25th birthday in his dual capacity as a soldier and war correspondent. As a young man, Churchill sought a life of adventure, punctuated by his highly publicised escape from a Boer prisoner of war camp in 1899 that launched his political career in 1900. For the next 55 years, the energetic, imperialistic, and pugnacious Churchill embedded himself into the historical record – a record that is far from unblemished. Writing to his beloved wife Clementine in 1915, Churchill remarked that he “would have made nothing if [he] had not made mistakes”. It was however his ability to learn from mistakes and to never be crushed by failure, combined with immense personal courage, that launched Churchill into greatness.
A stubborn and opinionated man, Churchill was often wrong, and clung to notions that he ought to have abandoned sooner. He opposed female suffrage more fervently and for longer than his contemporaries. He, according to John Meynard Keynes, restored the Gold Standard at too high a parity and allowed himself to be misled on economic issues by subpar advisors as Chancellor of the Exchequer. A believer in social Darwinism, Churchill subscribed to the idea that the white race in general, and the British aristocracy in particular, was naturally ascendent over all other races and peoples. Disastrously, Churchill masterminded the Dardanelles campaign as First Lord of the Admiralty, a naval offensive designed to capture Constantinople and rapidly defeat the Ottoman Empire in the opening years of the First World War. Though the Dardanelles campaign was, in the final analysis, botched by others (i.e., the majority decision of the War Cabinet to commit to a land invasion after the initial thrust through the Ottoman Straits was repelled, and the sluggish build-up of the offensive by naval commanders and officials that allowed the Ottomans to fortify the Dardanelles), its genesis was Churchill, who bore the ultimate blame for 300,000 allied casualties. This campaign, if successful, would have been the greatest strategic manoeuvre since Ulysses S. Grant’s capture of Vicksburg a half century earlier, doubling the pain of defeat for Churchill, who fancied himself a strategist in the vein of his heroes Napoleon, Horatio Nelson, and his famous martial ancestor, the First Duke of Marlborough. At this time, Churchill seriously considered suicide. He resigned his position in the Government and volunteered to fight in the trenches on the Western Front to restore his shattered reputation. As commander of a Scottish infantry battalion, Churchill performed bravely, venturing into no-mans-land on numerous occasions, narrowly escaping death more than once, and earning the respect of his initially sceptical regiment. Upon his return, the redeemed Churchill headed British munitions manufacturing efforts, rapidly increasing the nation’s output of shells, small-arms ammunition, and other war materiel dramatically. However, following the 1929 Labour electoral victory, Churchill was side-lined politically and would play no major role in British politics until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Defeat and failure never crushed the iron-willed Churchill, who believed that as long as people would still hear him speak he had a chance to gain political ascendency. A brilliant orator, Churchill devised four principles that make a good speech; correctness of diction, rhythm, accumulation of argument, and analogy. Much like Abraham Lincoln, he favoured short words of one or two syllables, deceptively simple sentences, and repetitive phrases (“we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence...”), wielding his lifelong speech impediment as a tool to grab and hold the listener in thrall. In the so-called ‘wilderness years’ of his political career from 1929 – 1939, Churchill levelled attacks on the successive Labour governments of Ramsey MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain for their weakness in enforcing the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, and eventually their appeasement of Adolf Hitler’s nascent Reich. A philo-semite and student of history, Churchill was among the first to worry about the vicious antisemitism of the Nazis, and viewed Hitler as the latest would-be European conqueror to threaten the British Isles, a recurring historical occurrence stretching back to William the Conqueror in the 11th century. A political outcast and iconoclast, the belligerent Churchill was labelled a warmonger by his contemporaries who lacked the stomach for British rearmament in the interwar years, fearful of provoking another ghastly global conflict. In 1938, as the Nazi war machine menaced Czechoslovakia, Churchill warned, to no avail, that “the might behind the German dictator increases daily. His appetite may grow with eating”. Following Chamberlain’s infamous decision to cede the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany at Munich, Churchill issued his ominous verdict in the House of Commons that “terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against Western democracies: thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting”.
Churchill’s hour arrived in May of 1940 when he was sworn in as Prime Minister, succeeding the now disgraced Chamberlain. As Hitler’s Reich engulfed Europe in darkness, Churchill infused the British public with his own tenacity. Though Britain lacked viable strategic options to oppose the Nazis on the continent, and faced a full-scale invasion of the British Isles, Churchill’s ultimate faith in victory never faltered. Disgusted by the notion of ceding British sovereignty to the Nazis in a peace pact, Churchill declared that “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”. In the event of a Nazi amphibious invasion, Churchill intended to use the phrase “you can always take one with you” in a speech to the British public. From the Battle of Britain and the Blitz all the way to V-E Day, Churchill filled the airwaves with inspired oratory. Unlike the secretive and disdainfully aloof Adolf Hitler, Churchill was conspicuous throughout the war, bolstering morale by visiting troops, shipyards, and factories. Churchill’s physical courage served as a further source of inspiration. During the Blitz, he would sit atop the roof of a government building with a pair of binoculars to observe the attacks on London. In an era where aviation was a risky enterprise, global conflict notwithstanding, Churchill flew further distances than any other wartime leader. Learning from the catastrophic Dardanelles campaign, Churchill never once overruled his joint chiefs of staff when they unanimously opposed his strategic vision throughout his wartime premiership, contrasting starkly with the arrogant and megalomaniacal Hitler, who rarely if ever listened to subordinates. By keeping Britain in the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December of 1941, Churchill kept the British fleet out of Hitler’s hands, and, in doing so, may have saved all of Western civilisation.
Churchill’s greatness is typified by his courage, iron-will, oratory capacity, and his foresight. Few men have had such an outsized impact on the historical stage. Churchill teaches us that we ought to study history for its application to the present, and that we must learn from our mistakes. His opposition to appeasement in the 1930s teaches us that we should not cede an inch to tyrants who wish to do us harm, and lends credence to the old Roman phrase: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war).