The approaching 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth on 30 November has prompted a surge of comment, both positive and negative, about his life. But across that spectrum one detects a shared assumption about how to characterise Churchill, especially during his “finest hour” as Britain’s wartime prime minister in 1940-45. Adjectives such as “defiant” or “resolute” recur; he’s often described as a “diehard” or a “bulldog”. Indeed, the latter image was used for years by the Churchill Insurance Company (no connection with the family) to suggest, adroitly, its own reliability.
I’m not denying the validity of that perspective on Churchill, but I do think this stereotype has missed something really important. What made Churchill a great leader in Britain’s “darkest hour” is not just his rock-like defiance. We’ve lost sight of Churchill the Improviser.
The celebrated photo of Churchill in bulldog mode was taken by Yousuf Karsh, a young Armenian-Canadian portrait photographer, on 30 December 1941, just after the prime minister had addressed the Canadian parliament in Ottawa. The speech was a virtuoso blend of grandiloquence and vaudeville. Churchill declared: “Hitler and his Nazi gang have sown the wind; let them reap the whirlwind.” And, with the United States recently joining the British empire in the Second World War, he reminded his audience how the French government had crumbled in June 1940. “When I warned them that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their prime minister and his divided cabinet, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.’” Loaded pause. “Some chicken.” A gale of laughter. “Some neck.” Thunderous applause.
Flushed with his triumph, Churchill swept out of the chamber and into an anteroom where a stiff brandy and a Havana cigar awaited, together with young Karsh. Nobody had mentioned the photo, but Churchill did consent to just one shot. He stood there, wreathed in smoke, ignoring Karsh’s polite requests to stop puffing, just for a moment. So the photographer suddenly leaned forward, grabbed the cigar from his jaw and clicked the shutter. “He looked so belligerent, he could have devoured me,” Karsh recalled later. That picture made the young man’s name. It also would also define Churchill’s image.
So, what’s missing? Let’s go back to the very start of his war premiership. King George VI appointed him as prime minister, in succession to Neville Chamberlain, at 6pm on 10 May 1940. Three days later, Churchill addressed the Commons for the first time as premier. “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” As the historian Richard Toye has observed, repetition of that word “victory” five times in one sentence left nobody in any doubt of Churchill’s determination.
So far, so familiar. But events were already cutting the ground from under his feet. Early on 10 May, the “Phoney War” came to an end as Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium and France. Over the next few days Churchill was immersed in constructing a coalition government – all the more challenging because he was not the head of any political party (Chamberlain remained Tory leader). But on 15 May at 7.30am (a profoundly un-Churchillian hour), he was awakened by a phone call from Paul Reynaud, the French prime minister, who exclaimed in English: “We are beaten; we have lost the battle.”
The next day, Churchill flew to Paris for a crisis meeting in the Quai d’Orsay, France’s foreign ministry. There, General Maurice Gamelin, the French commander-in-chief, explained how German tanks had made a surprise breakthrough across the Meuse river at Sedan and were thrusting towards the Channel, around the back of the French and British armies. “Où est la masse de manoeuvre?” (“Where are your reserves?”) demanded Churchill. With a Gallic shrug, Gamelin uttered just one word: “Aucune.” (“None.”)
No strategic reserve! Churchill was incredulous. Struggling to think, he walked over to the windows. In the gardens below he saw “venerable officials” pushing wheelbarrows full of archives on to great bonfires. Already, the evacuation of Paris was being prepared. In his memoirs, Churchill called this “one of the greatest surprises I have had in my life”.
Since boyhood, Churchill had yearned to be prime minister. But his road had proved very bumpy: changing parties twice, carrying the can for the Gallipoli fiasco in 1915, being consigned to the political wilderness for much of the 1930s. And then, less than a week after he gained the prize, aged 65, the German guttersnipe shattered Britain’s whole strategy for waging the war. What we now know as Churchill’s “finest hour” was largely frantic improvisation. And he would have to keep improvising throughout the war, and arguably for the rest of his political life.
In the war of 1914-18, the French army had anchored the Western Front and during the 1930s Churchill had assumed that in the “Grand Alliance” of the next war, Britain would provide the sea power and France the land power. That’s why in May 1940 there were only ten British divisions on the Western Front alongside more than 100 French. But now Britain would have to create a mass army, invent a new strategy and find new allies. When the chiefs of staff submitted an assessment of what should be Britain’s strategy in “A Certain Eventuality” (Whitehall’s euphemism for a French collapse) to the cabinet, they warned that unless the United States was “willing to give us full economic and financial support… we do not think we could continue the war with any chance of success”.
In 1940 the US was firmly neutral, determined not to be dragged into another European war, and this was also a presidential election year. But Churchill was undaunted. Already in touch with the White House, he developed what he called “my personal correspondence” with president Franklin D Roosevelt into the main axis of British-American relations. During the war, the two leaders exchanged nearly 2,000 messages – 1,161 from Churchill, to which he devoted close attention, whereas Roosevelt’s were often drafted by aides, especially in 1944-45 as his health declined. From August 1941, the two leaders were able to meet in person, with Churchill doing most of the travelling across the Atlantic because of the Wheelchair President’s infirmity.
Watching the two of them at Tehran in November 1943, the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, observed how the usually garrulous Churchill now had to play “the role of courtier”, adding, “I am amazed at the patience with which he does this.” Churchill later declared that “no lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt”. He intended that friendship with Roosevelt would be the cornerstone of an enduring “special relationship” among the “English-speaking peoples”.
Even more remarkable was the relationship he improvised with Joseph Stalin. At the end of the First World War, Churchill had denounced the “foul baboonery” of Bolshevism, determined to strangle the revolution in its cradle, but during the next war his foreign policy changed significantly. On the evening of 22 June 1941, the day Hitler invaded the USSR, he spoke out on BBC radio. While refusing to “unsay” his past attacks on communism, he insisted that, “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.” And, as with the US, he sought a personal relationship with the man at the top – first through messages and then in person.
Wary in 1942 of a premature attempt to liberate occupied Europe, Churchill wanted first to weaken the Axis by attacking its “soft underbelly” in North Africa and Italy and by the systematic bombing of German cities before risking the cross-Channel assault. He was sure that this peripheral strategy had to be explained man to man, but he also became intensely curious about Stalin’s mentality.
During a series of meetings over four days in August 1942, culminating in a late-night booze-up before Churchill’s flight home, Stalin blew hot and cold. In their first discussion he applauded the PM’s promise to “shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city”, but in the second he virtually accused the British of cowardice for not opening an immediate “second front” in France. Such shifts of mood were actually a familiar Stalin tactic – to keep his interlocutors off balance – but Churchill decided the most probable reason for the “transformation” between meetings one and two was that “his Council of Commissars did not take the news I brought as well as he did. They perhaps have more power than we suppose and less knowledge.”
The “two Stalins” trope became Churchill’s way to explain the twists and turns of subsequent messages from Moscow: nasty ones came from “the machine” and friendly ones from Stalin himself. The Soviet leader was cast almost as the “moderate”, keeping at bay “hardliners” in the depths of the Kremlin. Churchill believed that the personal relationship he was forging would help contain the threat of Soviet expansion.
He paid a second visit to the Kremlin in October 1944, and also met Stalin at two conferences with Roosevelt and one with Harry Truman in 1943-45. These journeys were no picnic for a man now entering his seventies. And conference diplomacy required around-the-clock vigilance. But, as Churchill liked to observe, “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” His improvisations helped to keep Britain at the top table with the emerging “superpowers”. At a photo op during the Tehran conference in November 1943, when someone said the Big Three looked like thee Holy Trinity, Stalin quipped, “If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.”
Nor did Churchill’s faith in his personal diplomacy abate with the onset of the Cold War. Don’t be distracted by the stereotype of his speech at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, which has fixated on his line about the “Iron Curtain” that had descended across eastern Europe. Churchill’s own title for the speech was “The Sinews of Peace”. He was using the mounting danger from the USSR to persuade Americans not to retreat into isolationism, as in the 1920s, but to convert the wartime “special relationship” into a permanent alliance. This, he insisted, could deter the Russians and keep the peace because “there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness”. He said that he sought “a good understanding with Russia” backed by “the whole strength of the English-speaking world”.
And who better to reach this understanding than the man with unique experience of dealing with the US and the USSR during the war? That became Churchill’s justification for staying on as Tory leader after his election defeat in 1945 until he won a second term in 1951. Calling for “parley at the summit” – another of his additions to the lexicon of diplomacy – he was able to “stay in the pub”, if not till “closing time” then at least until after his 80th birthday. And then, in 1956, he watched his long-time heir-apparent, Eden, commit Suezide.
With all this in mind, let’s return to his “finest hour” in 1940. That phrase originated in the speech he delivered to the Commons on 18 June 1940, as the French were negotiating an armistice. Churchill declared:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation… If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
Here was a classic of Churchillian oratory. Helping his listeners to understand their place in history, not just chronologically but existentially. Using hyperbole to grab their attention. And the vivid starkness of the alternative futures he conjured up.
But the speech also has a little-known backstory – and this really matters. Six days earlier, Churchill had met the French leaders at Briare, where it became clear that they were about to capitulate. Afterwards his mood was sombre, as General “Pug” Ismay, his military secretary, recalled in 1946 for Roosevelt’s former speechwriter, Robert Sherwood. According to Sherwood’s notes, “When Churchill went to the airport to return to England, he said to Ismay that, it seems, ‘We fight alone.’ Ismay said he was glad of it, that ‘We’ll win the Battle of Britain.’ Churchill gave him a look and remarked, ‘You and I will be dead in three months’ time.’”
Ismay asked Sherwood to keep those remarks to himself, fearing they would sound defeatist and sully Churchill’s reputation. But to my eyes, that episode actually serves to enhance Churchill’s standing. Far from being an unthinkingly pugnacious bulldog, this was a man who stared into the abyss on 12 June, but could nevertheless look up on 18 June and declaim words of inspiration to his country and the world. Whatever the doubts in his heart, Churchill was able to put on what the historian John Keegan called “the mask of command”. That’s the sign of a truly great leader.
When Churchill published his war memoirs, he used Their Finest Hour as the title for volume two. The phrase has become indissolubly attached to him. Not only was he the British bulldog, but also the consummate improviser. During the Battle of Britain, he paid tribute to the RAF: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” One might say of Churchill: “Never has so much been done with so little for so long.”
But what of his country? The British empire is no more, and postwar Britain has not seen much of those “broad shining uplands” for which he hoped. Brexit hasn’t proved a panacea, and the new Labour government is struggling for answers. So, when future generations mark Churchill’s 200th or 250th birthdays, will Their Finest Hour be seen as a kind of national obituary? Perhaps this is where our “Churchill complex” has its downside.
After 1945, the bulldog did become a diehard, reluctant to let go of India and mapping out a new geopolitical conceit for global power. Addressing the Tory party conference in 1948, Churchill sketched out the “three great circles among the free nations and democracies”: “the British Commonwealth and empire”; “the English-speaking world”, including the United States; and “United Europe”. He drew particular attention to the special position of Britain within this “majestic” global geometry: “If you think of the three interlinked circles you will see that we are the only country which has a great part in every one of them… we have the opportunity of joining them all together.”
Churchill reprised the three circles as a policy paper for the cabinet in 1951. In fact, both major parties believed that postwar Britain could have its cake and eat it. During the 1950s, any chance of turning the movement for European integration towards a free-trade area was vitiated by the failure of Labour and Tory governments to get engaged in the negotiations during their formative stage. Britain’s belated application to join the European Economic Community (EEC) was then vetoed by President Charles de Gaulle. By the time the UK did join, in 1973, the EEC’s club rules had set firm, to Britain’s detriment, and the oil crisis signalled the end of Europe’s postwar boom.
There followed half a century of betwixt and between. As the “awkward partner” within Europe, the UK thrashed around from Harold Wilson’s first referendum to David Cameron’s second, punctuated by dramas such as Margaret Thatcher’s demands for a budget rebate and the British opt-out from monetary union. Meanwhile, successive prime ministers kept chanting the Churchillian mantra of “special relationship” while the wartime ties in intelligence and service cooperation, though still important, were losing their uniqueness compared with America’s other alliances.
Today, however, facing the known unknowns of a Trump second term, at a time when the EU is struggling with a structural crisis, and Germany has lost its economic and political clout, there may be scope and space for the UK to be a significant actor. But only if it abstains from delusions of global grandstanding and accepts its role as a mid-sized power – though one with significant assets. Here’s where our national Churchill complex can get in the way. We must look to that other side of the man: the improviser rather than the bulldog. And it has to be realistic (yet adventurous) improvisation – the Churchill of 1940, not the fantasy choreographer of the 1950s. In that way, perhaps, his finest hour will not prove to be Britain’s as well. In other words, not our national obituary – all downhill after 1940 – but with the future still open.
David Reynolds is the author of “Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him” (HarperCollins). He co-hosts the “Creating Churchill” podcast with Russell Barnes
[See also: The combat zone]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone