Winston Churchill Encyclopedia PDF

6/9/2019 Winston Churchill -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill, in full Sir Winston Leonard Spencer
Churchill, (born November 30, 1874, Blenheim Palace, TABLE OF CONTENTS
Oxfordshire, England—died January 24, 1965, London),
Introduction
British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister
(1940–45, 1951–55) rallied the British people during World Political career before 1939
War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to Leadership during World War II
victory. Postwar political career
After a sensational rise

to prominence in national politics before World War I,
Churchill acquired a reputation for erratic judgment in
the war itself and in the decade that followed. Politically
suspect in consequence, he was a lonely gure until his
response to Adolf Hitler’s challenge brought him to
leadership of a national coalition in 1940. With Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin he then shaped Allied
strategy in World War II, and after the breakdown of the
alliance he alerted the West to the expansionist threat of
the Soviet Union. He led the Conservative Party back to
of ce in 1951 and remained prime minister until 1955,
Churchill, Winston
when ill health forced his resignation.
Winston Churchill, photographed by Yousuf
Karsh, 1941. In Churchill’s veins ran the blood of both of the English-
Karsh/Woodfin Camp and Associates
speaking peoples whose unity, in peace and war, it was
to be a constant purpose of his to promote. Through his
father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the meteoric Tory politician, he was directly descended from
John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, the hero of the wars against Louis XIV of France in
the early 18th century. His mother, Jennie Jerome, a noted beauty, was the daughter of a New
York nancier and horse racing enthusiast, Leonard W. Jerome.
The young Churchill passed an unhappy and sadly neglected childhood, redeemed only by
the affection of Mrs. Everest, his devoted nurse. At Harrow his conspicuously poor academic
record seemingly justi ed his father’s decision to enter him into an army career. It was only at
the third attempt that he managed to pass the entrance examination to the Royal Military
College, now Academy, Sandhurst, but, once there, he applied himself seriously and passed
out (graduated) 20th in a class of 130. In 1895, the year of his father’s tragic death, he entered
the 4th Hussars. Initially the only prospect of action was in Cuba, where he spent a couple of
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months of leave reporting the Cuban war of independence from Spain for the Daily Graphic
(London). In 1896 his regiment went to India, where he saw service as both soldier and
journalist on the North-West Frontier (1897). Expanded as The Story of the Malakand Field
Force (1898), his dispatches attracted such wide attention as to launch him on the career of
authorship that he intermittently pursued throughout his life. In 1897–98 he wrote Savrola
(1900), a Ruritanian romance, and got himself attached to Lord Kitchener’s Nile expeditionary
force in the same dual role of soldier and correspondent. The River War (1899) brilliantly
describes the campaign.
Political career before 1939
The ve years after Sandhurst saw Churchill’s interests expand and mature. He relieved the
tedium of army life in India by a program of reading designed to repair the de ciencies of
Harrow and Sandhurst, and in 1899 he resigned his commission to enter politics and make a
living by his pen. He rst stood as a Conservative at Oldham, where he lost a by-election by a
narrow margin, but found quick solace in reporting the South African War for The Morning
Post (London). Within a month after his arrival in South Africa he had won fame for his part in
rescuing an armoured train ambushed by Boers, though at the price of himself being taken
prisoner. But this fame was redoubled when less than a month later he escaped from
military prison. Returning to Britain a military hero, he laid siege again to Oldham in the
election of 1900. Churchill succeeded in winning by a margin as narrow as that of his previous
failure. But he was now in Parliament and, forti ed by the £10,000 his writings and lecture
tours had earned for him, was in a position to make his own way in politics.
A self-assurance redeemed from arrogance only by a kind of boyish charm made Churchill
from the rst a notable House of Commons gure, but a speech defect, which he never
wholly lost, combined with a certain psychological inhibition to prevent him from
immediately becoming a master of debate. He excelled in the set speech, on which he
always spent enormous pains, rather than in the impromptu; Lord Balfour, the Conservative
leader, said of him that he carried “heavy but not very mobile guns.” In matter as in style he
modeled himself on his father, as his admirable biography, Lord Randolph Churchill (1906;
revised edition 1952), makes evident, and from the rst he wore his Toryism with a difference,
advocating a fair, negotiated peace for the Boers and deploring military mismanagement
and extravagance.
As Liberal minister
In 1904 the Conservative government found itself impaled on a dilemma by Colonial

Secretary Joseph Chamberlain’s open advocacy of a tariff. Churchill, a convinced free trader,
helped to found the Free Food League. He was disavowed by his constituents and became
increasingly alienated from his party. In 1904 he joined the Liberals and won renown for the
audacity of his attacks on Chamberlain and Balfour. The radical elements in his political
makeup came to the surface under the in uence of two colleagues in particular, John Morley,
a political legatee of W.E. Gladstone, and David Lloyd George, the rising Welsh orator and
rebrand. In the ensuing general election in 1906 he secured a notable victory in Manchester
and began his ministerial career in the new Liberal government as undersecretary of state for
the colonies. He soon gained credit for his able defense of the policy of conciliation and self-
government in South Africa. When the ministry was reconstructed under Prime Minister
Herbert H. Asquith in 1908, Churchill was promoted to president of the Board of Trade, with a
seat in the cabinet. Defeated at the ensuing by-election in Manchester, he won an election at
Dundee. In the same year he married the beautiful Clementine Hozier; it was a marriage of
unbroken affection that provided a secure and happy background for his turbulent career.
At the Board of Trade, Churchill emerged as a leader in the movement of Liberalism away
from laissez-faire toward social reform. He completed the work begun by his predecessor,
Lloyd George, on the bill imposing an eight-hour maximum day for miners. He himself was
responsible for attacking the evils of “sweated” labour by setting up trade boards with power
to x minimum wages and for combating unemployment by instituting state-run labour
exchanges.
When this Liberal program necessitated high taxation, which in turn provoked the House of
Lords to the revolutionary step of rejecting the budget of 1909, Churchill was Lloyd George’s
closest ally in developing the provocative strategy designed to clip the wings of the upper
chamber. Churchill became president of the Budget League, and his oratorical broadsides at
the House of Lords were as lively and devastating as Lloyd George’s own. Indeed Churchill, as
an alleged traitor to his class, earned the lion’s share of Tory animosity. His campaigning in
the two general elections of 1910 and in the House of Commons during the passage of the
Parliament Act of 1911, which curbed the House of Lords’ powers, won him wide popular
acclaim. In the cabinet his reward was promotion to the of ce of home secretary. Here,
despite substantial achievements in prison reform, he had to devote himself principally to
coping with a sweeping wave of industrial unrest and violent strikes. Upon occasion his relish
for dramatic action led him beyond the limits of his proper role as the guarantor of public
order. For this he paid a heavy price in incurring the long-standing suspicion of organized
labour.
In 1911 the provocative German action in sending a gunboat to Agadir, the Moroccan port to
which France had claims, convinced Churchill that in any major Franco-German con ict
Britain would have to be at France’s side. When transferred to the Admiralty in October 1911,
he went to work with a conviction of the need to bring the navy to a pitch of instant
readiness. His rst task was the creation of a naval war staff. To help Britain’s lead over
steadily mounting German naval power, Churchill successfully campaigned in the cabinet for
the largest naval expenditure in British history. Despite his inherited Tory views on Ireland, he
wholeheartedly embraced the Liberal policy of Home Rule, moving the second reading of the
Irish Home Rule Bill of 1912 and campaigning for it in the teeth of Unionist opposition.
Although, through his friendship with F.E. Smith (later 1st earl of Birkenhead) and Austen
Chamberlain, he did much to arrange the compromise by which Ulster was to be excluded
from the immediate effect of the bill, no member of the government was more bitterly
abused—by Tories as a renegade and by extreme Home Rulers as a defector.
During World War I
War came as no surprise to Churchill. He had already held a test naval mobilization. Of all the
cabinet ministers he was the most insistent on the need to resist Germany. On August 2, 1914,
on his own responsibility, he ordered the naval mobilization that guaranteed complete
readiness when war was declared. The war called out all of Churchill’s energies. In October
1914, when Antwerp was falling, he characteristically rushed in person to organize its defense.
When it fell the public saw only a disillusioning defeat, but in fact the prolongation of its
resistance for almost a week enabled the Belgian Army to escape and the crucial Channel
ports to be saved. At the Admiralty, Churchill’s partnership with Adm. Sir John Fisher, the rst
sea lord, was productive both of dynamism and of dissension. In 1915, when Churchill became
an enthusiast for the Dardanelles expedition as a way out of the costly stalemate on the
Western Front, he had to proceed against Fisher’s disapproval. The campaign aimed at
forcing the straits and opening up direct communications with Russia. When the naval
attack failed and was called off on the spot by Adm. J.M. de Robeck, the Admiralty war group
and Asquith both supported de Robeck rather than Churchill. Churchill came under heavy
political attack, which intensi ed when Fisher resigned. Preoccupied with departmental
affairs, Churchill was quite unprepared for the storm that broke about his ears. He had no
part at all in the maneuvers that produced the rst coalition government and was powerless
when the Conservatives, with the sole exception of Sir William Maxwell Aitken (soon Lord
Beaverbrook), insisted on his being demoted from the Admiralty to the duchy of Lancaster.
There he was given special responsibility for the Gallipoli Campaign (a land assault at the
straits) without, however, any powers of direction. Reinforcements were too few and too late;
the campaign failed and casualties were heavy; evacuation was ordered in the autumn.
In November 1915 Churchill resigned from the government and returned to soldiering, seeing
active service in France as lieutenant colonel of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers. Although he
entered the service with zest, army life did not give full scope for his talents. In June 1916,
when his battalion was merged, he did not seek another command but instead returned to
Parliament as a private member. He was not involved in the intrigues that led to the
formation of a coalition government under Lloyd George, and it was not until 1917 that the
Conservatives would consider his inclusion in the government. In March 1917 the publication
of the Dardanelles commission report demonstrated that he was at least no more to blame
for the asco than his colleagues.
Even so, Churchill’s appointment as minister of munitions in July 1917 was made in the face of
a storm of Tory protest. Excluded from the cabinet, Churchill’s role was almost entirely
administrative, but his dynamic energies thrown behind the development and production of
the tank (which he had initiated at the Admiralty) greatly speeded up the use of the weapon
that broke through the deadlock on the Western Front. Paradoxically, it was not until the war
was over that Churchill returned to a service department. In January 1919 he became
secretary of war. As such he presided with surprising zeal over the cutting of military
expenditure. The major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Of ce was, however, the
Allied intervention in Russia. Churchill, passionately anti-Bolshevik, secured from a divided
and loosely organized cabinet an intensi cation and prolongation of the British involvement
beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation—and in the face of the
bitter hostility of labour. And in 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn,
Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded the Ukraine.
In 1921 Churchill moved to the Colonial Of ce, where his principal concern was with the
mandated territories in the Middle East. For the costly British forces in the area he
substituted a reliance on the air force and the establishment of rulers congenial to British
interests; for this settlement of Arab affairs he relied heavily on the advice of T.E. Lawrence.
For Palestine, where he inherited con icting pledges to Jews and Arabs, he produced in 1922
the White Paper that con rmed Palestine as a Jewish national home while recognizing
continuing Arab rights. Churchill never had departmental responsibility for Ireland, but he
progressed from an initial belief in rm, even ruthless, maintenance of British rule to an
active role in the negotiations that led to the Irish treaty of 1921. Subsequently, he gave full
support to the new Irish government.
In the autumn of 1922 the insurgent Turks appeared to be moving toward a forcible
reoccupation of the Dardanelles neutral zone, which was protected by a small British force at
Chanak (now Çanakkale). Churchill was foremost in urging a rm stand against them, but
the handling of the issue by the cabinet gave the public impression that a major war was
being risked for an inadequate cause and on insuf cient consideration. A political debacle
ensued that brought the shaky coalition government down in ruins, with Churchill as one of
the worst casualties. Gripped by a sudden attack of appendicitis, he was not able to appear in
public until two days before the election, and then only in a wheelchair. He was defeated
humiliatingly by more than 10,000 votes. He thus found himself, as he said, all at once
“without an of ce, without a seat, without a party, and even without an appendix.”
In and out of of ce, 1922–29
In convalescence and political impotence Churchill turned to his brush and his pen. His
painting never rose above the level of a gifted amateur’s, but his writing once again provided
him with the nancial base his independent brand of politics required. His autobiographical
history of the war, The World Crisis, netted him the £20,000 with which he purchased
Chartwell, henceforth his country home in Kent. When he returned to politics it was as a
crusading anti-Socialist, but in 1923, when Stanley Baldwin was leading the Conservatives on
a protectionist program, Churchill stood, at Leicester, as a Liberal free trader. He lost by
approximately 4,000 votes. Asquith’s decision in 1924 to support a minority Labour
government moved Churchill farther to the right. He stood as an “Independent Anti-Socialist”
in a by-election in the Abbey division of Westminster. Although opposed by an of cial
Conservative candidate—who defeated him by a hairbreadth of 43 votes—Churchill
managed to avoid alienating the Conservative leadership and indeed won conspicuous
support from many prominent gures in the party. In the general election in November 1924
he won an easy victory at Epping under the thinly disguised Conservative label of
“Constitutionalist.” Baldwin, free of his irtation with protectionism, offered Churchill, the
“constitutionalist free trader,” the post of chancellor of the Exchequer. Surprised, Churchill
accepted; dumbfounded, the country interpreted it as a move to absorb into the party all the
right-of-centre elements of the former coalition.
In the ve years that followed, Churchill’s early liberalism survived only in the form of
advocacy of rigid laissez-faire economics; for the rest he appeared, repeatedly, as the leader of
the diehards. He had no natural gift for nancial administration, and though the noted
economist John Maynard Keynes criticized him unsparingly, most of the advice he received
was orthodox and harmful. His rst move was to restore the gold standard, a disastrous
measure, from which owed de ation, unemployment, and the miners’ strike that led to the
general strike of 1926. Churchill offered no remedy except the cultivation of strict economy,
extending even to the armed services. Churchill viewed the general strike as a quasi-
revolutionary measure and was foremost in resisting a negotiated settlement. He leaped at
the opportunity of editing the British Gazette, an emergency of cial newspaper, which he
lled with bombastic and frequently in ammatory propaganda. The one relic of his earlier
radicalism was his partnership with Neville Chamberlain as minister of health in the cautious
expansion of social services, mainly in the provision of widows’ pensions.
In 1929, when the government fell, Churchill, who would have liked a Tory-Liberal reunion,
deplored Baldwin’s decision to accept a minority Labour government. The next year an open
rift developed between the two men. On Baldwin’s endorsement of a Round Table
Conference with Indian leaders, Churchill resigned from the shadow cabinet and threw
himself into a passionate, at times almost hysterical, campaign against the Government of
India bill (1935) designed to give India dominion status.
Exclusion from of ce, 1929–39
Thus, when in 1931 the National Government was formed, Churchill, though a supporter, had
no hand in its establishment or place in its councils. He had arrived at a point where, for all
his abilities, he was distrusted by every party. He was thought to lack judgment and stability
and was regarded as a guerrilla ghter impatient of discipline. He was considered a clever
man who associated too much with clever men—Birkenhead, Beaverbrook, Lloyd George—
and who despised the necessary humdrum associations and compromises of practical
politics.
In this situation he found relief, as well as pro t, in his pen, writing, in Marlborough: His Life
and Times, a massive rehabilitation of his ancestor against the criticisms of the 19th-century
historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. But overriding the past and transcending his worries
about India was a mounting anxiety about the growing menace of Hitler’s Germany. Before a
supine government and a doubting opposition, Churchill persistently argued the case for
taking the German threat seriously and for the need to prevent the Luftwaffe from securing
parity with the Royal Air Force. In this he was supported by a small but devoted personal
following, in particular the gifted, curmudgeonly Oxford physics professor Frederick A.
Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), who enabled him to build up at Chartwell a private
intelligence centre the information of which was often superior to that of the government.
When Baldwin became prime minister in 1935, he persisted in excluding Churchill from of ce
but gave him the exceptional privilege of membership in the secret committee on air-
defense research, thus enabling him to work on some vital national problems. But Churchill
had little success in his efforts to impart urgency to Baldwin’s administration. The crisis that
developed when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 found Churchill ill prepared, divided between a
desire to build up the League of Nations around the concept of collective security and the
fear that collective action would drive Benito Mussolini into the arms of Hitler. The Spanish
Civil War (1936–39) found him convinced of the virtues of nonintervention, rst as a supporter
and later as a critic of Francisco Franco. Such vagaries of judgment in fact re ected the
overwhelming priority he accorded to one issue—the containment of German
aggressiveness. At home there was one grievous, characteristic, romantic misreading of the
political and public mood, when, in Edward VIII’s abdication crisis of 1936, he vainly opposed
Baldwin by a public championing of the King’s cause.
When Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin, the gulf between the Cassandra-like
Churchill and the Conservative leaders widened. Repeatedly the accuracy of Churchill’s
information on Germany’s aggressive plans and progress was con rmed by events;
repeatedly his warnings were ignored. Yet his handful of followers remained small; politically,
Chamberlain felt secure in ignoring them. As German pressure mounted on Czechoslovakia,
Churchill without success urged the government to effect a joint declaration of purpose by
Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. When the Munich Agreement with Hitler was
made in September 1938, sacri cing Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, Churchill laid bare its
implications, insisting that it represented “a total and unmitigated defeat.” In March 1939
Churchill and his group pressed for a truly national coalition, and, at last, sentiment in the
country, recognizing him as the nation’s spokesman, began to agitate for his return to of ce.
As long as peace lasted, Chamberlain ignored all such persuasions.
Leadership during World War II
In a sense, the whole of Churchill’s previous career had been a preparation for wartime
leadership. An intense patriot; a romantic believer in his country’s greatness and its historic
role in Europe, the empire, and the world; a devotee of action who thrived on challenge and
crisis; a student, historian, and veteran of war; a statesman who was master of the arts of
politics, despite or because of long political exile; a man of iron constitution, inexhaustible
energy, and total concentration, he seemed to have been nursing all his faculties so that
when the moment came he could lavish them on the salvation of Britain and the values he
believed Britain stood for in the world.
On September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on

Germany, Chamberlain appointed Churchill to his old
post in charge of the Admiralty. The signal went out to
the eet: “Winston is back.” On September 11 Churchill
received a congratulatory note from Pres. Franklin D.
Roosevelt and replied over the signature “Naval Person”;
a memorable correspondence had begun. At once
Churchill’s restless energy began to be felt throughout
the administration, as his ministerial colleagues as well
as his own department received the rst of those
pungent minutes that kept the remotest corners of
British wartime government aware that their
shortcomings were liable to detection and penalty. All his
efforts, however, failed to energize the torpid Anglo-
Churchill, Winston French entente during the so-called “phony war,” the
Winston Churchill. period of stagnation in the European war before the

FSA-Office of War Information
German seizure of Norway in April 1940. The failure of the
Collection/Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C. (LC-USW33-019093-C) Narvik and Trondheim expeditions, dependent as they
were on naval support, could not but evoke some
memories of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, so fateful for Churchill’s reputation in World War I.
This time, however, it was Chamberlain who was blamed, and it was Churchill who
endeavoured to defend him.
As prime minister
The German invasion of the Low Countries, on May 10, 1940, came like a hammer blow on top
of the Norwegian asco. Chamberlain resigned. He wanted Lord Halifax, the foreign
secretary, to succeed him, but Halifax wisely declined. It was obvious that Churchill alone
could unite and lead the nation, since the Labour Party, for all its old distrust of Churchill’s
anti-Socialism, recognized the depth of his commitment to the defeat of Hitler. A coalition
government was formed that included all elements save the far left and right. It was headed
by a war cabinet of ve, which included at rst both Chamberlain and Halifax—a wise but
also magnanimous recognition of the numerical strength of Chamberlainite conservatism—
and two Labour leaders, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood. The appointment of Ernest
Bevin, a tough trade-union leader, as minister of labour guaranteed cooperation on this vital
front. Offers were made to Lloyd George, but he declined them. Churchill himself took, in
addition to the leadership of the House of Commons, the Ministry of Defence. The pattern
thus set was maintained throughout the war despite many changes of personnel. The
cabinet became an agency of swift decision, and the government that it controlled remained
representative of all groups and parties. The Prime Minister concentrated on the actual
conduct of the war. He delegated freely but also probed and interfered continuously,
regarding nothing as too large or too small for his attention. The main function of the chiefs
of the armed services became that of containing his great dynamism, as a governor
regulates a powerful machine; but, though he prodded and pressed them continuously, he
never went against their collective judgment. In all this, Parliament played a vital part. If
World War II was strikingly free from the domestic political intrigues of World War I, it was in
part because Churchill, while he always dominated Parliament, never neglected it or took it
for granted. For him, Parliament was an instrument of public persuasion on which he played
like a master and from which he drew strength and comfort.
On May 13 Churchill faced the House of Commons for the rst time as prime minister. He
warned members of the hard road ahead—“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and
sweat”—and committed himself and the nation to all-out war until victory was achieved.
Behind this simplicity of aim lay an elaborate strategy to which he adhered with remarkable
consistency throughout the war. Hitler’s Germany was the enemy; nothing should distract
the entire British people from the task of effecting its defeat. Anyone who shared this goal,
even a Communist, was an acceptable ally. The indispensable ally in this endeavour, whether
formally at war or not, was the United States. The cultivation and maintenance of its support
was a central principle of Churchill’s thought. Yet whether the United States became a
belligerent partner or not, the war must be won without a repetition for Britain of the
catastrophic bloodlettings of World War I; and Europe at the con ict’s end must be
reestablished as a viable, self-determining entity, while the Commonwealth should remain as
a continuing, if changing, expression of Britain’s world role. Provided these essentials were
preserved, Churchill, for all his sense of history, was surprisingly willing to sacri ce any
national shibboleths—of orthodox economics, of social convention, of military etiquette or
tradition—on the altar of victory. Thus, within a couple of weeks of this crusading anti-
Socialist’s assuming power, Parliament passed legislation placing all “persons, their services
and their property at the disposal of the Crown”—granting the government in effect the
most sweeping emergency powers in modern British history.
The effort was designed to match the gravity of the hour. After the Allied defeat and the
evacuation of the battered British forces from Dunkirk, Churchill warned Parliament that
invasion was a real risk to be met with total and con dent de ance. Faced with the swift
collapse of France, Churchill made repeated personal visits to the French government in an
attempt to keep France in the war, culminating in the celebrated offer of Anglo-French union
on June 16, 1940. When all this failed, the Battle of Britain began on July 10. Here Churchill
was in his element, in the ring line—at ghter headquarters, inspecting coast defenses or
antiaircraft batteries, visiting scenes of bomb damage or victims of the “blitz,” smoking his
cigar, giving his V sign, or broadcasting frank reports to the nation, laced with touches of
grim Churchillian humour and splashed with Churchillian rhetoric. The nation took him to its
heart; he and they were one in “their nest hour.”
Other painful and more debatable decisions fell to Churchill. The French eet was attacked to
prevent its surrender intact to Hitler. A heavy commitment was made to the concentrated
bombing of Germany. At the height of the invasion threat, a decision was made to reinforce
British strength in the eastern Mediterranean. Forces were also sent to Greece, a costly
sacri ce; the evacuation of Crete looked like another Gallipoli, and Churchill came under
heavy re in Parliament.
In these hard days the exchange of U.S. overage destroyers for British Caribbean bases and
the response, by way of lend-lease, to Churchill’s boast “Give us the tools and we’ll nish the
job” were especially heartening to one who believed in a “mixing-up” of the English-speaking
democracies. The unspoken alliance was further cemented in August 1941 by the dramatic
meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, which produced
the Atlantic Charter, a statement of common principles between the United States and
Britain.
Formation of the “grand alliance”
When Hitler launched his sudden attack on the Soviet Union, Churchill’s response was swift
and unequivocal. In a broadcast on June 22, 1941, while refusing to “unsay” any of his earlier
criticisms of Communism, he insisted that “the Russian danger…is our danger” and pledged
aid to the Russian people. Henceforth, it was his policy to construct a “grand alliance”
incorporating the Soviet Union and the United States. But it took until May 1942 to negotiate
a 20-year Anglo-Soviet pact of mutual assistance.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) altered, in Churchill’s eyes, the whole
prospect of the war. He went at once to Washington, D.C., and, with Roosevelt, hammered
out a set of Anglo-American accords: the pooling of both countries’ military and economic
resources under combined boards and a combined chiefs of staff; the establishment of unity
of command in all theatres of war; and agreement on the basic strategy that the defeat of
Germany should have priority over the defeat of Japan. The grand alliance had now come
into being. Churchill could claim to be its principal architect. Safeguarding it was the primary
concern of his next three and a half years.
In protecting the alliance, the respect and affection between him and Roosevelt were of
crucial importance. They alone enabled Churchill, in the face of relentless pressure from
Stalin and ardent advocacy by the U.S. chiefs of staff, to secure the rejection of the “second
front” in 1942, a project he regarded as premature and costly. In August 1942 Churchill
himself ew to Moscow to advise Stalin of the decision and to bear the brunt of his
displeasure. At home, too, he came under re in 1942: rst in January after the reverses in
Malaya and the Far East and later in June when Tobruk in North Africa fell to the Germans,
but on neither occasion did his critics muster serious support in Parliament. The year 1942
saw some reconstruction of the cabinet in a “leftward” direction, which was re ected in the
adoption in 1943 of Lord Beveridge’s plan for comprehensive social insurance, endorsed by
Churchill as a logical extension of the Liberal reforms of 1911.
Military successes and political problems
The Allied landings in North Africa necessitated a fresh meeting between Churchill and
Roosevelt, this time in Casablanca in January 1943. There Churchill argued for an early, full-
scale attack on “the under-belly of the Axis” but won only a grudging acquiescence from the
Americans. There too was evolved the “unconditional surrender” formula of debatable
wisdom. Churchill paid the price for his intensive travel (including Tripoli, Turkey, and Algeria)
by an attack of pneumonia, for which, however, he allowed only the briefest of respites. In
May he was in Washington again, arguing against persistent American aversion to his
“under-belly” strategy; in August he was at Quebec, working out the plans for Operation
Overlord, the cross-Channel assault. When he learned that the Americans were planning a
large-scale invasion of Burma in 1944, his fears that their joint resources would not be
adequate for a successful invasion of Normandy were revived. In November 1943 at Cairo he
urged on Roosevelt priority for further Mediterranean offensives, but at Tehrān in the rst
“Big Three” meeting, he failed to retain Roosevelt’s adherence to a completely united Anglo-
American front. Roosevelt, though he consulted in private with Stalin, refused to see
Churchill alone; for all their friendship there was also an element of rivalry between the two
Western leaders that Stalin skillfully exploited. On the issue of Allied offensive drives into
southern Europe, Churchill was outvoted. Throughout the meetings Churchill had been
unwell, and on his way home he came down again with pneumonia. Though recovery was
rapid, it was mid-January 1944 before convalescence was complete. By May he was
proposing to watch the D-Day assaults from a battle cruiser; only the King’s personal plea
dissuaded him.
Insistence on military success did not, for Churchill,

mean indifference to its political implications. After the
Quebec conference in September 1944, he ew to
Moscow to try to conciliate the Russians and the Poles
and to get an agreed division of spheres of in uence in
the Balkans that would protect as much of them as
possible from Communism. In Greece he used British
forces to thwart a Communist takeover and at Christmas
King, W.L. Mackenzie; Roosevelt,
Franklin D.; Churchill, Winston ew to Athens to effect a settlement. Much of what
passed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945,
(From left, seated) Canadian Prime Minister
W.L. Mackenzie King, U.S. President including the Far East settlement, concerned only
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and British Prime Roosevelt and Stalin, and Churchill did not interfere. He
Minister Winston Churchill at an Allied
fought to save the Poles but saw clearly enough that
conference in Quebec, 1943.
there was no way to force the Soviets to keep their
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
promises. Realizing this, he urged the United States to
allow the Allied forces to thrust as far into eastern Europe
as possible before the Russian armies should ll the
vacuum left by German power, but he could not win over
Roosevelt, Vice Pres. Harry S. Truman, or their generals to
his views. He went to Potsdam in July in a worried mood.
But in the nal decisions of the conference he had no
Roosevelt, Franklin D.; Churchill, part; halfway through, when news came of his
Winston; Yalta Conference
government’s defeat in parliamentary elections, he had
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) to return to England and tender his resignation.
and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
discussing Allied war plans at the Yalta
Conference, February 1945.
Electoral defeat
U.S. Army Photo
Already in 1944, with victory in prospect, party politics
had revived, and by May 1945 all parties in the wartime
coalition wanted an early election. But whereas Churchill
wanted the coalition to continue at least until Japan was
defeated, Labour wished to resume its independence.
Churchill as the popular architect of victory seemed
unbeatable, but as an election campaigner he proved to
be his own worst enemy, indulging, seemingly at
Beaverbrook’s urging, in extravagant prophecies of the
Yalta Conference
appalling consequences of a Labour victory and
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Pres. identifying himself wholly with the Conservative cause.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Premier Joseph
His campaign tours were a triumphal progress, but it was
Stalin meeting at the Yalta Conference,
1945. the war leader, not the party leader, whom the crowds
U.S. Army Photo cheered. Labour’s careful but sweeping program of
economic and social reform was a better match for the
nation’s mood than Churchill’s amboyance. Though personally victorious at his Essex
constituency of Woodford, Churchill saw his party reduced to 213 seats in a Parliament of 640.
Postwar political career
As opposition leader and world statesman
The shock of rejection by the nation fell heavily on Churchill. Indeed, though he accepted the
role of leader of the parliamentary opposition, he was never wholly at home in it. The
economic and social questions that dominated domestic politics were not at the centre of
his interests. Nor, with his imperial vision, could he approve of what he called Labour’s policy
of “scuttle,” as evidenced in the granting of independence to India and Burma (though he
did not vote against the necessary legislation). But in foreign policy a broad identity of view
persisted between the front benches, and this was the area to which Churchill primarily
devoted himself. On March 5, 1946, at Fulton, Missouri, he enunciated, in the presence of
President Truman, the two central themes of his postwar view of the world: the need for
Britain and the United States to unite as guardians of the peace against the menace of Soviet
Communism, which had brought down an “iron curtain” across the face of Europe; and with
equal fervour he emerged as an advocate of European union. At Zürich, on September 19,
1946, he urged the formation of “a council of Europe” and himself attended the rst assembly
of the council at Strasbourg in 1949. Meanwhile, he busied himself with his great history, The
Second World War, six volumes (1948–53).
The general election of February 1950 afforded Churchill an opportunity to seek again a
personal mandate. He abstained from the extravagances of 1945 and campaigned with his
party rather than above it.
The electoral onslaught shook Labour but left them still in of ce. It took what Churchill called
“one more heave” to defeat them in a second election, in October 1951. Churchill again took a
vigorous lead in the campaign. He pressed the government particularly hard on its handling
of the crisis caused by Iran’s nationalization of British oil companies and in return had to
withstand charges of warmongering. The Conservatives were returned with a narrow
majority of 17, and Churchill became prime minister for the second time. He formed a
government in which the more liberal Conservatives predominated, though the Liberal Party
itself declined Churchill’s suggestion of of ce. A prominent gure in the government was
R.A. Butler, the progressive-minded chancellor of the Exchequer. Anthony Eden was foreign
secretary. Some notable Churchillians were included, among them Lord Cherwell, who, as
paymaster general, was principal scienti c adviser with special responsibilities for atomic
research and development.
As prime minister again
The domestic labours and battles of his administration were far from Churchill’s main
concerns. Derationing, decontrolling, rehousing, safeguarding the precarious balance of
payments—these were relatively noncontroversial policies; only the return of nationalized
steel and road transport to private hands aroused excitement. Critics sometimes complained
of a lack of prime ministerial direction in these areas and, indeed, of a certain slackness in the
reins of government. Undoubtedly Churchill was getting older and reserving more and more
of his energies for what he regarded as the supreme issues, peace and war. He was
convinced that Labour had allowed the transatlantic relationship to sag, and one of his rst
acts was to visit Washington (and also Ottawa) in January 1952 to repair the damage he felt
had been done. The visit helped to check U.S. fears that the British would desert the Korean
War, harmonized attitudes toward German rearmament and, distasteful though it was to
Churchill, resulted in the acceptance of a U.S. naval commander in chief of the eastern
Atlantic. It did not produce that sharing of secrets of atom bomb manufacture that Churchill
felt had unfairly lapsed after the war. To the disappointment of many, Churchill’s advocacy of
European union did not result in active British participation; his government con ned itself
to endorsement from the sidelines, though in 1954, faced with the collapse of the European
Defense Community, Churchill and Eden came forward with a pledge to maintain British
troops on the Continent for as long as necessary.
The year 1953 was in many respects a gratifying one for Churchill. It brought the coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II, which drew out all his love of the historic and symbolic. He personally
received two notable distinctions, the Order of the Garter and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
However, his hopes for a revitalized “special relationship” with Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower
during his tenure in the White House, beginning in 1953, were largely frustrated. A sudden
stroke in June, which caused partial paralysis, obliged Churchill to cancel a planned Bermuda
meeting at which he hoped to secure Eisenhower’s agreement to summit talks with the
Russians. By October, Churchill had made a remarkable recovery and the meeting was held
in December. But it did not yield results commensurate with Churchill’s hopes. The two
leaders, for all their amity, were not the men they once were; their subordinates, John Foster
Dulles and Anthony Eden, were antipathetic; and, above all, the role and status of each
country had changed. In relation to the Far East in particular there was a persistent failure to
see eye to eye. Though Churchill and Eden visited Washington, D.C., in June 1954 in hopes of
securing U.S. acceptance of the Geneva Accords designed to bring an end to the war in
Indochina, their success was limited. Over Egypt, however, Churchill’s conversion to an
agreement permitting a phased withdrawal of British troops from the Suez base won
Eisenhower’s endorsement and encouraged hopes, illusory as it subsequently appeared, of
good Anglo-American cooperation in this area. In 1955, “arming to parley,” Churchill
authorized the manufacture of a British hydrogen bomb while still striving for a summit
conference. Age, however, robbed him of this last triumph. His powers were too visibly failing.
His 80th birthday, on November 30, 1954, had been the occasion of a unique all-party
ceremony of tribute and affection in Westminster Hall. But the tribute implied a pervasive
assumption that he would soon retire. On April 5, 1955, his resignation took place, only a few
weeks before his chosen successor, Sir Anthony Eden, announced plans for a four-power
conference at Geneva.
Retirement and death
Although Churchill laid down the burdens of of ce amid the plaudits of the nation and the
world, he remained in the House of Commons (declining a peerage) to become “father of the
house” and even, in 1959, to ght and win yet another election. He also published another
major work, A History of the English- Speaking Peoples, four volumes (1956–58). But his
health declined, and his public appearances became rare. On April 9, 1963, he was accorded
the unique distinction of having an honorary U.S. citizenship conferred on him by an act of
Congress. His death at his London home in January 1965 was followed by a state funeral at
which almost the whole world paid tribute. He was buried in the family grave in Bladon
churchyard, Oxfordshire.
Legacy
In any age and time a man of Churchill’s force and talents would have left his mark on events
and society. A gifted journalist, a biographer and historian of classic proportions, an amateur
painter of talent, an orator of rare power, a soldier of courage and distinction, Churchill, by
any standards, was a man of rare versatility. But it was as a public gure that he excelled. His
experience of of ce was second only to Gladstone’s, and his gifts as a parliamentarian hardly
less, but it was as a wartime leader that he left his indelible imprint on the history of Britain
and on the world. In this capacity, at the peak of his powers, he united in a harmonious whole
his liberal convictions about social reform, his deep conservative devotion to the legacy of his
nation’s history, his unshakable resistance to tyranny from the right or from the left, and his
capacity to look beyond Britain to the larger Atlantic community and the ultimate unity of
Europe. A romantic, he was also a realist, with an exceptional sensitivity to tactical
considerations at the same time as he unswervingly adhered to his strategical objectives. A
fervent patriot, he was also a citizen of the world. An indomitable ghter, he was a generous
victor. Even in the transition from war to peace, a phase in which other leaders have often
stumbled, he revealed, at an advanced age, a capacity to learn and to adjust that was in
many respects superior to that of his younger colleagues.
Herbert G. Nicholas
CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Winston Churchill
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 26 March 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winston-Churchill
ACCESS DATE: June 08, 2019

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6/9/2019 Winston Churchill -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

After a sensational rise

Political career before 1939

In 1904 the Conservative government found itself impaled on a dilemma by Colonial

During World War I

In and out of of ce, 1922–29

Exclusion from of ce, 1929–39

Leadership during World War II

On September 3, 1939, the day Britain declared war on

Winston Churchill. period of stagnation in the European war before the

Formation of the “grand alliance”

Military successes and political problems

Insistence on military success did not, for Churchill,

Postwar political career

As opposition leader and world statesman

As prime minister again

Retirement and death

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