Winston Churchill: The British Bulldog

The story behind Britain's greatest prime minister.

Hot History

Oct 04, 2023

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The Churchill family

Churchill was born on November 30, 1874 at the Bleinheim Palace, one of England’s most prominent estates.

Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, came from one of the nation’s most powerful aristocratic families. Lord Churchill descended from John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, whose military career spanned the reigns of five British monarchies in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Duke’s role in defeating the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 helped secure the throne of James II. For his collaboration with royalists, he was given the title Earl of Marlborough. Winston’s father, Randolph, was a powerful political voice in Great Britain in the late 19th century. But Lord Churchill struggled to make his way into the Conservative Party due to his opposition to Lord Salisbury, who dominated Conservatives in the 1880s and 1890s.

Winston’s mother, Jennie, was an American daughter of a New York financier and businessman named Leonard Jerome. She married Randolph in April of 1874, about half a year before Winston’s birth. The marriage of the Churchills was an example of the high-profile intermarriages between the traditional British aristocracy and American business dynasties during the Gilded Age. Rich families from the United States gained prestige through their ties to the English nobility, while the British happily received the fortunes produced by America’s industrial capitalism.

Winston’s parents had an unhappy marriage. Both of them had many affairs over the next 20 years. Lord Churchill actually died of syphilis at the age of 45 in 1895. But the couple was still close enough to have a second child, Winston’s brother named John, in 1880.

Victorian upbringing

Winston’s childhood was typical of the British upper class of the Late Victorian Era. He and his brother were raised by a nanny named Elizabeth Everest. They lived variously in Blenheim, London, and Ireland. Lord Churchill was appointed a British viceroy in Ireland in the late 1870s.

In the early 1880s, Winston attended the prestigious St. George’s School at Ascot in Berkshire. A lousy student, he often got in trouble for bad behavior. He narrowly passed the entrance exam to London’s centuries-old Harrow School in 1888.

By this time, the British Empire had reached its zenith, and was expanding aggressively in Africa. Winston was encouraged by his father to spend time abroad in the British military. He attempted to enroll at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Britain’s greatest military school. After several attempts, he finally managed to get admitted in 1893. He spent about a year there. Winston’s father died, leaving him as the new head of the family at age 18.

Colonial India

Having graduated from Sandhurst in 1895, Winston was immediately commissioned as a second lieutenant across the Atlantic Ocean. Cuba was fighting a war of independence against Spanish colonial rule. The Spanish Empire was desperate to retain its control over one of the last of its American colonies. With aid from the United States, the Cubans defeated the Spanish occupiers.

Churchill oversaw fighting on behalf of the British government. He wrote wartime reports for the Daily Graphic, which were intended for public consumption. After this, Churchill made a brief visit to his mother in New York City.

In the autumn of 1896, Churchill’s regiment was reassigned to Bombay, one of Britain’s oldest and most preeminent administrative centers in India. He spent a year and a half in this role. He accompanied the Malakand Field Force, commanded by Sir Bindon Blood. In 1897, the British forces moved north toward the region around Peshawar, where they waged a campaign against the Mohmands, a Pashtun tribe resisting British dominion in modern-day Pakistan.

Churchill made several visits to Calcutta. He toured much of the subcontinent. Many of his views about British imperialism, and the cultural inferiority of the vanquished peoples, were developed from his first-hand experiences. This deeply affected the policies he pursued later in life as Britain’s prime minster. He became a voracious reader, and particularly enjoyed the works of Plato and Darwin. He was especially smitten with Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Conquest of Sudan

Back in England, in 1898, Churchill grew increasingly interested in politics. He favored the Liberal Party, but was disenchanted by its support for Irish self-government.

Within weeks, Churchill was sent to Africa, where the British Empire was expanding rapidly. By the mid-1890s, this had brought the British into conflict with the Mahdist Islamist forces, who controlled much of the Sudan region. Churchill rose to a position in the British expeditionary force, which was sent to the region in 1898 under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener.

As he arrived in early autumn, Churchill wrote reports on the expedition for the press back in Britain. He gave first-hand details of the Battle of Omdurman, which was fought near Khartoum, Sudan on September 2, 1898. A combined Anglo-Egyptian force of about 25,000 men defeated a Sudanese army over twice its size. It was a classic example of how European armies, equipped with modern machine guns, could defeat numerically superior enemies. Churchill’s opinions were not uncritically in favor of Great Britain, and he objected to the harsh treatment of the Egyptian and Sudanese allies. He also criticized how the British expeditionary force killed wounded combatants. He published his thoughts in a book called The River War in 1899.

Following his return from Sudan, Churchill entered politics formally. Like his father, he generally aligned himself with the Conservative Party. He was defeated by a Liberal candidate.

Boer Wars

Churchill was sent to South Africa, where the British fought against the Orange Free State and the Republic of Transvaal. Tensions had beeb rising between the Brits and the Boers. The Boers were descendants from the Dutch, Germans, and French Huguenot settlers who had migrated to South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries to establish independent colonies. When they found gold and diamond mines, the British proceeded to annex those states. War broke out in the autumn of 1899, known as the Second Boer War.

In the first weeks of the conflict, Churchill was taken prisoner by the Boers. He escaped, and made his way to Portuguese East Africa. He returned south, and rejoined the British troops. Winston witnessed the British siege of Ladysmith, which captured the Boer capital at Pretoria. A guerrilla war persisted for another two years. The British employed scorched earth tactics, and detained thousands of Boers in concentration camps. However, Churchill never saw this part of the conflict. He recorded his experiences in another book, called Ian Hamilton’s March. He returned home to Britain, where he made another attempt at a parliamentary seat. Around this time, Churchill developed an affinity for alcohol. Wine, scotch, whiskey, and vintage brandy were his drinks of choice. He remained a heavy drinker throughout his entire adult life.

Parliamentary career

Churchill became a member of Parliament at the age of 25. The 1900 election was also significant as the first time that the Labour Party ran candidates in a national British election. Over the next several decades, the Labour Party would emerge as Churchill’s biggest rival in domestic British politics.

With a Conservative victory, Lord Salisbury was able to form a new coalition. In February of 1901, Churchill distinguished himself with an early speech that condemned the British atrocities against the Boers. It was a controversial move.

Winston was opposed by some of his fellow Conservatives because of his perceived friendliness toward senior members of the opposing Liberal Party.

At the turn of the century, the Conservatives and Liberals were divided over economic issues. Conservatives favored protectionism, while the Liberals endorsed free trade. Liberals felt that Great Britain could benefit by opening up its overseas markets to German, French, American, and Russian trade. Churchill generally held a favorable view of free trade, a position that aligned him with Liberals. He disagreed on Conservative orthodoxy on many issues, including military spending, the Boer Wars, and the Irish Question.

He briefly considered founding his own party, which would merge elements from the existing Conservative and Liberal Parties. By 1904, he had become a pariah to Conservatives, and formally became a Liberal. He spent the next 18 years as a Liberal member of Parliament.

Wife

In the mid-1900s, Churchill began courting a beautiful young woman named Clementine Cozier, the daughter of a land-owning aristocrat named Sir Henry Hozier. They married in the Church of St. Margaret in Westminster Abbey in 1908. The couple moved to London, where they had a daughter named Diana in 1909. Four more children followed. Winston and his wife moved to Chartwell, where they spent much of their lives.

Labor strikes

Under the Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, Churchill served as the president of the Board of Trade. In this role, he was responsible for negotiating with trade unions. At the time, militant labor strikes broke out across Britain and North America. Churchill responded by introducing reforms, such as the eight-hour workday and temporary benefits to the unemployed. He did this to diffuse the fast-rising popularity of the Labour Party in the 1906 election.

Home Secretary

In 1910, Churchill rose to the post of Home Secretary. In this job, he oversaw policing, immigration and border policy, the prison system, and certain aspects of the judicial system.

The main issue was the Women’s Suffragist movement, which demanded the right for women to vote. Churchill, who had expressed opposition in the late 1890s, relented on his earlier position. He was prepared to accept women’s voting if the majority of British men also agreed. He proposed a national referendum, but there was no agreement. Women’s suffrage continued to drag on as an issue going into the 1910s.

In 1911, Churchill was appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty. This gave him control over the British Royal Navy, which was still the greatest in the world at the time. He remained in that office for several years, as Europe lurched toward a calamitous global conflict.

Another prominent issue for Liberals was the Irish Question. For decades, the Irish had demanded Home Rule, but this blocked by the Unionists of Northern Ireland. Churchill favored Home Rule, and hated the Unionist proposal to partition Ireland. Just as Ireland seemed to reach a resolution by 1913, the First World War broke out.

World War One

For years, tensions had been brewing between the great powers of Europe over a wide range of issues. The European empires clashed for colonial control over Africa, while nationalist uprisings in the Balkans contributed to further global instability. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in 1914, a regional crisis escalated into a world war. Britain, France, and Russia went to war against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Theaters of the war spanned the entire planet.

During WWI, Churchill helped to organize mass troop movements. In the trenches of northeastern France, the French and British fought against the Germans. Churchill felt that the Royal Navy could relieve the Western Front by striking a blow against the Ottoman Empire. This would allow the Russians to refocus their efforts on defeating the Germans in Poland and Ukraine.

Winston wanted to weaken the Turks by launching a naval assault on the Straits of Gallipoli, the entryway into the Bosphorus, which was a significant waterway for Istanbul. If successful, the attack had the potential to capture Istanbul and knock the Ottomans out of the war entirely.

Drawing troops from Australia and New Zealand, the British launched a major expedition to Gallipoli. But it became one of Britain’s worst mistakes of the war, dragging on for a whole year. From 1915 to 1916, nearly half a million Allied troops were committed to the effort. But due to their superior strategic positions, the Turks managed to place the Allies under siege. Over several months of attritional warfare, the British and their friends suffered over 50,000 casualties.

The Gallipoli campaign proved to be a colossal error by Churchill, and he lost his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. Conservatives swept into office, and British politicians assembled a wartime coalition.

Having lost favor in politics, Churchill resolved to rejoin the military. In 1916, he led forces in the Western Front. Winston himself was nearly killed by shrapnel in France. When he returned to the House of Commons months later, it gave him a new appreciation for ordinary British soldiers. He demanded better accommodations for veterans.

It was not long before Churchill rejoined politics, however. He was formally absolved of the failed Gallipoli campaign by the Dardanelles Commission of 1917. Under a new Liberal government led by David Lloyd George, Churchill was appointed as Minister of Munitions. Winston was tasked with managing the wartime economy. Much of his work involved negotiating with striking laborers in munitions factories.

Britain, France, and the United States ultimately won the war by November of 1918. This was largely because the Allied economies were more resilient, while the Central Powers could not sustain the stresses of the wartime economy. Despite Imperial Germany’s initial victories, the empire collapsed in the face of internal dissension and depleted resources.

Interwar Period

The end of WWI did little to bring peace to Europe. Civil wars erupted across the continent, as the old colonial empires collapsed. The Interwar years, from 1918 to 1923, were even more bloody than the First World War. Churchill spent the early part of the Interwar era as the Secretary of State for War and Air. In those positions, he helped to demobilize millions of British and Allied troops.

Churchill’s attitudes toward the defeated Central Powers were mixed. He urged British and French occupation of Germany, but warned against an overly punitive approach in peace talks. He saw Germany as a promising ally against the growing throw of Bolshevism in Russia. The communists had seized power there in the late autumn of 1917. A bloody civil war followed into the 1920s. The British Empire sent an expeditionary force into northern Russia to assist the counter-revolutionaries. As Minister of War, Churchill was closely involved in those efforts. He was consistent in his opposition to communism.

Meanwhile, Britain and France carved up the Ottoman Empire into Middle Eastern mandates. The British controlled Iraq, but it was difficult to pacify the northern Kurds, who were violently opposed to foreign rule. An insurgency was waged in 1920. Churchill suggested trying out chemical weapons against what he regarded as savage, uncivilized tribes. However, the logistics were impossible at the time. Chemical weapons would be later banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925.

Ireland was another big problem for Churchill in the 1920s. Earlier, he had expressed a moderate support for Irish Home Rule. Many Irish Catholics desired independence from Great Britain. But the Northern Irish and their friends in British Parliament were reluctant to cede control of the colony. Churchill’s opinions changed after the Irish waged a war of independence against Britain in the aftermath of WWI. He began to express support for the use of British paramilitaries to subdue the Irish. Churchill was central to negotiations that produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which provided qualified independence.

Churchill was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies in February of 1921. This was an especially significant role, since the British had gained massive territorial concessions from WWI. Great Britain inherited colonies from the defeated Ottomans and Germans. Churchill turned his attention toward the Middle East, where many Levantines and Arabs had supported the British in WWI. They felt betrayed, because the British had promised freedom from the Ottomans. Palestinians were disturbed by Zionists, who urged the creation of a Jewish state. Initially sympathetic to the Jews, Churchill changed his mind after seeing Jewish communists revolt in 1921. Dozens were killed, and hundreds more were wounded. The rioters demanded an end to British rule in the Levant, and wanted to establish a Soviet Palestine. This did little to endear Churchill to the Zionist cause.

Red Menace

In the autumn of 1922, a crisis broke out over the British control of the Dardanelles, near Gallipoli. It split Liberals and Conservatives, and Churchill lost his seat as a member of Parliament that November. He failed to regain it in 1923. The Labour Party began their rule over the British government for the first time in history.

This seismic shift in British politics forced Churchill to rethink his own political allegiances. Traditionally, Liberals were willing to grant concessions to the Labour Party. But with the threat of aligning the British Empire with Soviet Russia, Churchill began to view the Labour Party more suspiciously.

Conservatives and the Labour Party became the dominant players in British politics, while the Liberals drifted toward obscurity.

Gold standard

By 1924, Churchill had rejoined the Conservatives. Days later, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, and oversaw Britain’s finances until the summer of 1929. This position was second in importance only to that of the prime minister. His main decision was to restore the gold standard. Britain’s currency, the pound sterling, became tied to the nation’s gold reserves and the global price for gold. This had been the cause for Western nation states for centuries, but had been temporarily abandoned by Britain during WWI.

Churchill’s decision to restore the gold standard had both positive and negative effects. It led to deflation, which was needed to handle state expenditures from the Great War. But it also led to massive job losses and unemployment, especially in the steel industry, which had been Britain’s economic backbone for 150 years.

“Wilderness Years”

Following the Wall Street Crash, the British formed a national government in 1931. The Depression years saw Churchill take a backseat in British politics. When the Conservatives regained power in the mid-1930s, Churchill was sidelined. These are known as the “Wilderness Years” of his political career. Churchill may have suffered from an emotional depression, which he called his “black dog.” He took heavily to the bottle. However, he maintained his activity as a writer. He wrote a book about WWI, titled The World Crisis. He published what is arguably his greatest book, which was a biography of his ancestor John Churchill.

By the 1930s, Conservatives and Labour reached an agreement regarded the controversial status of the British Raj. India would receive Dominion status, which would grant some self-government while retaining British influence. Under this arrangement, London still retained control over India’s foreign policy and military affairs.

As Winston grew older, he became increasingly imperialist and monarchist. He was especially contemptuous of India’s independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, who led the National Congress. Churchill saw the subjugated peoples of the British Empire as less evolved than their British masters. To his mind, India was not prepared culturally or politically for self-government. When the India Bill was proposed in December of 1934, Churchill voted against it. But it passed anyway.

Hitler’s Germany

Churchill became an early opponent of Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany. The Fürher became Chancellor of Germany in the first weeks of 1933, and the Nazis quickly dismantled the Weimar Republic’s government. They turned it into a one-party state. In April of 1933, Churchill spoke out vocally against Hitler. As the Nazis rearmed Germany, against the terms of Versailles, Churchill condemned British appeasement. He was horrified by Germany’s rapid buildup of air forces, which outpaced that of Britain after 1935. However, in the eyes of many British people, Churchill was discredited by his staunch opposition to Indian self-rule, including his personal attacks against Gandhi’s widely respected character.

Churchill continued to warn the British political establishment of the grave threat posed by the Nazis going into the mid-1930s and beyond. Despite this, many failed to see the danger. In the Interwar years, fascistic dictatorships had sprung up in Italy and Spain. But the primary threat, to many British people, was Stalin’s Soviet Union. If Moscow supported communist revolutions across Western and Central Europe, the British populace feared that Russia would gain total continental control. From this perspective, the Nazis appeared to be a bulwark against the rise of socialism. In 1936, David Lloyd George, an old friend of Churchill, visited Nazi Germany, where he met Hitler. George was deeply impressed by the regime’s efforts to rebuild Germany after the Depression. British fascists, such as Oswald Mosley, enthusiastically endorsed Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

But Churchill was not convinced. Despite his own conservative affinities, he aligned himself with the Anti-Nazi Council, a left-wing British organization. To work alongside them, Winston toned down his anti-Soviet rhetoric. The Council held rallies, and worked with British intelligence to surveil Germany’s rearmament programs.

To make matters worse, Britain’s own politics suffered convulsive changes. Britain got a new monarch, King Edward VIII, in 1936. Edward was determined to marry an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson. This caused a constitutional crisis, forcing him to abdicate in favor of his younger brother, who became King George VI.

Appeasement

Neville Chamberlain became the new prime minster in 1937, and he pursued a policy of appeasement. Churchill vocally opposed Chamberlain.

By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany was in full expansion mode. In March of 1938, the Nazis pressured Austria into an annexation. Greater Germany was declared. Nazi flags were flown in Vienna. Churchill made a speech to the House of Commons, warning against the gravity of the situation. But most people still ignored him.

After annexing Austria, Hitler demanded control over the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia that was filled with ethnic Germans. By autumn of 1938, Germany’s military threatened an invasion if the European powers did not cave to their demands. Churchill was adamant that Britain could not allow this to happen. He personally visited Chamberlain, urging him to threaten war against Hitler. But the prime minister ignored Churchill’s advice. Instead, a few days later, he flew to Munich, where the Munich Agreement was signed on September 30, 1938. It gave the Sudetenland to Hitler, with the promise that Germany would make no further demands.

Churchill was appalled. He described Munich as a “total and unmitigated defeat.” In March of 1939, Hitler breached the terms of the agreement when the Nazis proceeded to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia. They installed a vassal state. Poland was declared Hitler’s next target.

As war loomed, Britain and France furiously rebuilt their armaments. Back in England, Churchill’s reputation was rehabilitated, and his popularity soared among the British public. He had been right all along since 1933. Chamberlain reluctantly incorporated Churchill into the British government.

Second World War

When Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, Britain finally declared war on the Nazi Reich. Churchill reassumed his position as First Lord of the Admiralty. He oversaw the Navy for the first eight months of the war. Known as the Phoney War, there was little actual conflict on the Western Front.

Germany quickly overran Poland by late 1939. Neither Hitler nor the Allies was prepared to make a move. Unsure what to do next, the British turned their attention toward Norway, which was a strategic location along Northern Europe and the North Atlantic. Norway was neutral, but it was suspected that Hitler would invade Norway and Sweden in the spring, as a means of securing huge iron ore deposits.

Throughout the winter of 1939 and spring of 1940, Churchill and the Admiralty worked out strategic plans to lay down sea mines along Norway’s coastline, or to occupy Norway’s ports. Sure enough, the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway. Thousands of German paratroopers were airlifted into Norway’s main cities and ports. In response to the German occupation of Norway, the British, French, Polish, and Norwegians assembled an expeditionary force to liberate the North Atlantic in April of 1940.

Prime Minister

With Hitler on the ascent, Chamberlain’s government lost all serious support from the British populace. Enter Winston Churchill, Britain’s prime minister. That very day, Germans proceeded to conquer Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. Churchill assembled a coalition government across party lines, in an effort to shore up British national unity.

On May 13, 1940, he delivered his first address to the House of Commons. “I have nothing to offer but blood, toils, tears and sweat,” he proclaimed. This was the first of three speeches that he made in the summer of 1940, which galvanized the nation to resist the Nazis.

However, there was still a significant portion of Parliament that was ready to negotiate peace terms with Hitler. They grew stronger after seeing Hitler’s rapid success in the Low Countries. He moved on Paris within weeks of the first invasion in May of 1940. By the end of the month, the British Expeditionary Force, consisting of about 300,000 men, were trapped in the French port city of Dunkirk. They were rescued by a naval mission led by thousands of small British fishing and merchant vessels.

As troops returned to southern England, Churchill made the second of his famous speeches. He declared, “We shall never surrender.” The Germans rapidly conquered France by the early summer of 1940. This left many British dispirited, and they feared that a German conquest of Britain was coming soon. Great Britain stood largely alone against the Nazis. Even many senior members of Churchill’s government feared that a negotiated peace would be the only viable option. But Churchill gave a third speech, where he declared “our inflexible resolve to continue the war.”

The Blitz

The Germans conducted a brutal bombing campaign from late summer of 1940 onward, called the Blitz. For the next year and a half, the British were bombarded ruthlessly. Churchill was left as the world’s sole leader of the resistance to Nazi Germany.

Going into the winter of 1940 and 1941, Churchill desperately appealed for aid from American President Roosevelt. FDR hated the Nazis, but the American public was against intervening in a European conflict. However, the president did negotiate the Lend-Lease Program with Churchill, which came into effect in March of 1941. This allowed the US to provide Britain with extensive support without a formal declaration of war. Food, oil, and war materials were shipped out from the United States to Great Britain.

US aid was a crucial help to Churchill’s government. The British managed to hold out, until the other Allies could open up a Western Front in France. Hitler decided to end the Blitz, and turned his attention toward invading the Soviet Union.

The Allied Powers

In the summer of 1941, the Nazis launched the world’s largest land invasion in human history. A staggering three million men poured into the USSR. Initially, the Germans performed effectively. They advanced toward Moscow and Leningrad by late 1940. But their advance stalled. Imperial Japan, an ally of Nazi Germany, inflicted an unprovoked attack against the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States was furious, and declared war on the Axis powers. It was a turning point for the war. Now, Churchill was aided by two other great powers: Soviet Russia, and the United States. Their combined might could muster a formidable resistance to the Nazi Reich. In 1942, the Soviet Russians fought a fierce resistance to the Nazi Germans in the Eastern Front of Europe.

Japanese invasion

However, the entry of Japan into the war forced Britain to handle another theater of operations in Southern Asia. After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese proceeded to invade British colonies in Singapore and Burma. Singapore fell to the Japanese on February 15, 1942.

Churchill’s government made a terrible miscalculation. They believed that the land bridge from Malaysia to Singapore was impassable, but they thought wrong. Churchill regarded it as the worst defeat in British military history.

The Japanese invaded further westward, reaching Burma and Bangladesh from 1942 to 1943. Japan had advanced so far into the British Raj, that the city of Calcutta was bombed regularly. But their conquests were halted on the northeastern frontier of India, and reversed over the course of 1943.

The situation in South Asia enabled Gandhi to pressure the British into granting independence. He led the “Quit India” campaign, and arranged for an orderly British withdrawal from India after the war in exchange for India’s assistance against Hitler. Pressured by Roosevelt, Churchill was forced to acquiesce to some of these anti-colonial demands. This paved the way for India’s independence in 1947.

Churchill’s legacy remains controversial because of the famine that broke out in Bengal, a border region between modern-day India and Bangladesh. Over the course of 1943, a famine killed between two and four million people. The exact number is unknown. Millions more suffered from malnutrition and displacement. It was a largely man-made famine. It occurred after the Japanese occupied Burma and cut off rice imports to the eastern subcontinent in 1942. Churchill, fearing a Japanese invasion, ordered a scorched earth policy in India. Thousands of acres were seized and destroyed. From 1941 to 1942, Churchill’s government mass-conscripted farm workers. These policies, combined with natural disasters like cyclones, spread the starvation far and wide. Progressives and Indian historians have attempted to blame Churchill for the famine.

But Churchill’s defenders counter that the British prime minister, upon understanding the depth of the crisis, diverted 250,000 tons of grain to India. Japan was to blame for the crisis, as well as shipping problems due to the war. The local government did not allocate resources effectively, and natural disasters only worsened the hellish nightmare.

“End of the beginning”

In North Africa, the Italians and Germans attempted to push out the British. The Axis dictatorships wanted control over the Suez in Egypt, which would provide a pathway into the oil riches of the Middle East. What was once a regional conflict in the Sahara desert took on a greater significance in 1942. The tide was turned when the British won a major victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein. This coincided with Stalin’s victory at Stalingrad in southern Russia.

Back in London, Churchill triumphantly declared on November 10, 1942 that it was the “end of the beginning.” In the first half of the 1943, the war finally turned in favor of the Allies. By the end of that spring, the British, French, and Americans had seized North Africa. The Russians began to push the Germans back toward Poland and Ukraine. That summer, a long-anticipated second front was opened in Europe, where the Western Allies invaded Sicily and Italy.

Liberation of Europe

Finally, Churchill’s perseverance had paid off. Now, the Allies were able to open up a Western Front against the Nazi Germans. The British Isles were a vital strategic position to launch this invasion to liberate the western part of the continent. He was central to his plannings, and was especially anxious about the possibility of a bloody outcome or interception by the Germans.

Meanwhile, the British prime minister attempted diplomatic conferences in 1943 and 1944. He met with Allied leaders at Casablanca, Tehran, Quebec, Moscow, and finally Yalta in 1945. These summits were dominated by the Big Three: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. The three men, and their respective countries, determined the fate of the post-war world.

Each of them had their own concerns. Roosevelt was eager to destroy Japan after liberating Europe. Stalin was interested in asserting his dominion in Southern and Eastern Europe. The Russian leader was particularly concerned whether Greece, Poland, and the Balkans would fall under Western or Soviet influence. Churchill clashed with Stalin on this point. Even before the end of WWII, the seeds of the Cold War were already being sown.

Throughout the spring of 1945, as the Allies prepared to capture Berlin, they engaged in a massive bombing campaign to subdue Nazi Germany. The goal was to cripple the Reich’s economy and dismantle their industrial war-making infrastructure. Churchill advocated the use of an Area Bombing Directive. Over 4,000 tons of explosives were dropped on Dresden over 72 hours. 25,000 were killed. The Allies poured into Germany from both west and east.

By this point, Churchill had shifted his attention toward setting up the United Nations. This international body was seen as a mechanism to arbitrate global disputes, especially as Stalin sight his sights on Poland and Hungary. Debates were still being held between the Allies, even as the Russians encircled and besieged Berlin.

Hitler’s Reich collapsed. The Fürher committed suicide in Belin on April 30, 1945. About a week later, the Germans surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The war in Japan dragged on for another four months. But it came to a speedy conclusion after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was finally over.

“Iron curtain”

Churchill called a general election in Britain on July 5, 1945. The massively popular prime minister expected an easy electoral victory. But other factors were at play. William Beveridge, a civil servant, had called for the creation of a welfare state to prevent the rise of a fascist dictatorship in Britain. This included national health service and unemployment benefits. The Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, campaigned on those welfare policies. As a result, they won a crushing victory in the election.

Churchill, wounded by this turn against him, retired to the opposition benches. Out of office, he now turned his attention toward warning against the threat of Stalin’s Russia. Despite agreements with the Soviets at Tehran and Yalta, neither the West or the Soviets abided by them. Each side continued to occupy whatever territory was in their hands at the moment. Poland and Hungary were absorbed into the Soviet Bloc. In the Balkans, anti-Nazi resistance leader Josip Tito established Yugoslavia along Soviet lines, but in later years he would break with Moscow. The West managed to maintain its influence over Greece, thanks to massive funding by President Truman’s administration in the mid-1940s. Austria remained a point of contention. For a time, there were talks for partitioning the country along Western and Soviet lines.

During a three month tour in the US in early 1946, Churchill gave a famous speech at Westminister College in Fulton, Missouri about the growing conflict between the US-led Western Bloc and the Soviets. He famously called the Soviet Union an “iron curtain,” and urged the Western democracies to block any further expansion of the Russians into Europe. The British leader emphasized the common culture and language shared between the US and England. The Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe, while the Western Allies created NATO. The phrase “iron curtain” originated with Goebbels in the last months of WWII, but it was popularized by Churchill.

Post-war politics

After WWII, Churchill continued to maintain his larger-than-life influence in British politics as an opposition leader. He continued to resist efforts to give independence to India. He correctly predicted that the Third World country would fragment into religious and social sectarianism. He called for a peaceful unification of Northern and Southern Ireland. Failure to do so resulted in a bloody civil war lasting 30 years.

In an address to the University of Zurich in 1947, Churchill urged the people of Europe to create a “European family” of justice and freedom. He contemplated creating a United States of Europe. He was an early advocate for Britain’s entry into the European Coal and Steel Community, which was established in 1951 to promote free trade between France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg. As Britain lagged behind the other Western nation for two decades, it finally joined this European free trade alliance.

Despite losing the election of 1950 to Labour, Churchill still maintained his status as the leader of the Conservative Party. Attlee called for a snap election in 1951, but he miscalculated. Conservatives won even more seats, giving Churchill a majority to form a new government. Six years after his time as prime minister, the 77-year-old Churchill reprised this legendary role. He was preoccupied by foreign affairs, as well as the transition of British society back to normal life after the world war.

In 1953, Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his mastery of history, as well as his brilliant oratory. He published many books about history, some of which recounted his personal wartime experiences. Dozens of volumes of his speeches were printed and read. He wrote a History of the English Speaking Peoples, which was published from 1956 to 1958.

Final years

The elderly Churchill suffered a stroke in June of 1953. He was temporarily paralyzed on one side of his body. But he still declined to step down. Finally, by 1955, he could no longer serve as prime minister. He was granted a knighthood. Queen Elizabeth II offered to make him Duke of London, but he humbly refused.

Despite being age 80, he continued to serve as the honorary Father of the House for his decades of public service. Even after retiring to Chartwell, Winston actively followed current events. He was outraged by the British government’s handling of the Suez Crisis.

By the early 1960s, Churchill’s health reached its waning years. President Kennedy declared him an honorary American citizen in 1963. The House of Commons passed a special resolution thanking Churchill for over six decades of parliamentary service. He suffered another stroke, and died on January 24, 1965 at the age of 90.

He was given a state funeral, the first non-royal person to receive this honor since William Gladstone in 1898. A funeral was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in central London. The ceremony was attended by Queen Elizabeth. He was buried near his ancestral family home at Blenheim Palace.

Legacy

Churchill remains unquestionably one of the most important figures of the entire 20th century. It was a century shaped by his adept leadership, even in the bleakest and darkest of circumstances. He led the British resistance against Hitler’s totalitarian empire, and worked closely with the United States and the other Western democracies to resist the aggressive expansion of Stalinist Russia.

Winnie had a charismatic character without rival. His life was an Arabian Nights of mystery and wonder. As a colonial officer, he witnessed Britain’s conquest of Sudan. In Parliament, he debated some of Britain’s most pressing domestic debates, such as women’s suffrage and Irish independence.

Beyond his unparalleled leadership in World War Two, the legacy of Winston Churchill is not without its detractors. Critics point to his obstinate imperialism, his proposed use of chemical weapons in the Middle East, and his dismissive attitudes toward India’s independence movement. Other critics have claimed Churchill was a warmonger who was motivated by personal ambition. Still others have taken issue with Winston’s handling of the Bengal Famine.

But none of those criticisms could ever blot out his contributions to democracy and freedom. He was a strong supporter of free trade, national sovereignty and, eventually, women’s rights. He was a lone voice anticipating the horrors of Hitler’s regime, as well as the coming Cold War in 1945. Even as a British imperialist, Winston criticized the Empire’s brutality in the Boer War and the First World War.

Winston’s most enduring legacy will always be his resilience and fortitude in the face of Nazi aggression. Amid the dark days of the Blitz of 1940, the heroic prime minister rallied the nation to hold out. Had he not done so, the world might still be under the despotic domination of Hitler’s genocidal Reich.