The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

by William Manchester

For a man of action, however, he was exceptionally thoughtful and well read. When serving as a young subaltern in India, he amassed a private library that included Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Plato’s Republic, Schopenhauer on pessimism, Malthus on population, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action. After a lifetime of reading—from the sea-adventuring Hornblower novels to the complete Shakespeare and Macaulay—he possessed the acumen to reduce complex intellectual systems and constructs and theories to their most basic essences. He once brought a wartime dinner conversation on socialism to an abrupt end by recommending that those present read Maurice Maeterlinck’s entomological study, The Life of the White Ant. “Socialism,” Churchill declared, “would make our society comparable to that of the white ant.” Case closed.

“Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants,” he wrote, “comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.”36

“I take refuge beneath the impenetrable arch of probability.”

“rarely went to church. When approached about this, he [Churchill] said he was not a pillar of the church but a buttress—he supported it from the outside.”

Churchill’s love of history was abiding and his knowledge profound. Memorizing dates and place-names has always been the bane of schoolchildren. Yet for a few, Churchill assuredly among them, history is more than a time line, more than the sequencing and parsing of collective memory. In those such as Churchill, history, by way of imagination and discipline, becomes part of personal memory, no less so than childhood recollections of the first swim in the ocean or the first day of school. Churchill did not simply observe the historical continuum; he made himself part of it.

All who knew him had heard him recite, at one time or another, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome: Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods.” All who knew him came to know that in Churchill such sentiments were intrinsic.

“in May 1940 the mere thought of Churchill as Prime Minister sends a cold chill down the spines of the staff at No. 10 Downing Street…. Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice & so prepared to have its doubts justified.”

It was in fact a solemn oath, a statement of literal intent, which admitted to no ambiguity: “You ask, what is our aim? I 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. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire” and all it has stood for, “no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward toward its goal.”

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail…. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue and the liberation of the old.80

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. 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 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.”145

Afterward, Englishmen as skeptical of politicians as Bernard Shaw and Malcolm Muggeridge agreed that had anyone but Churchill been prime minister in the summer of 1940, Britain would have negotiated an armistice with Hitler.

Now they recalled the maxim: “England always loses every battle except the last one.”

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: This is the war that England knows, When no allies are left, no help To count upon from alien hands, No waverers remain to woo, No more advice to listen to, And only England stands.152

Dowding, it seemed, would end the battle in the skies over England with more fighters than he had at the beginning.198

“In every such battle I saw, the English had the best of it, and in every such battle they were greatly outnumbered.” Repeatedly “five or six fighters would engage twenty or thirty Germans…. I saw it happen not once but many times.”

wrote: “At Dover the first sharp thrust of hope penetrated our gloom. The battles over the cliffs proved that British could and would fight for their own freedom, if for nothing else, and that they would do so against colossal odds…. The flash of the Spitfire’s wing, then, through the misty glare of the summer sky, was the first flash of a sharpened sword; they would fight, they would hold out.”207

The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge of mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and their devotion.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Those words have become immortal, yet they were but a prelude to Churchill’s main point, the RAF bombing campaign:

In a single week Dowding had lost 80 percent of his squadron commanders. One

Often pilots had logged no more than ten hours of flight before sighting an enemy fighter.

In just two weeks he had lost 230 pilots, killed and wounded—25 percent of his pilots. At

it. The archbishop asked what would happen if a bomb were to score a direct hit. Churchill, ever ready with a blasphemous aside, replied, “In that case, my dear Archbishop, you will have to regard it as a divine summons.”274

He broadcast from the roof of the BBC, “I have seen many flags flying from staffs. No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack above their roof.” And, said Murrow, “No flag up there was white.”290

“The power of enduring suffering in the ordinary people of every country, when their spirit is roused,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “seems to have no bounds.”299

“great gift for making them forget discomfort, danger, and loss and remember that they were living history.”

“Allons, bonne nuit; dormez bien, reassemblez vos forces pour l’aube [Good night, then; sleep well to gather strength for the dawn].

If he did depart, it was likely because he demanded that his aides locate the exact area bombed, and that they bring the motorcar around in order that he should tour the scene. On one such outing, the blast from a nearby German bomb lifted Churchill’s car up off all four tires. The vehicle returned to the ground and rolled along for several yards on two wheels, before finally righting itself. It regained its stability, said Churchill, due to “my beef.” On another evening, Churchill, Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin, Pug Ismay, and Jock Colville packed themselves into the armored car. All were well plied with brandy. Their destination was Raynes Park, where they hoped to watch the anti-aircraft guns in action. On the way, a policeman tried to arrest them for driving with too-bright lights. The dutiful bobby was dismissed with a loud, “Go to Hell, man.” The phrasing of the outburst excludes Bevin as a suspect in uttering it. Born in a remote West England village and educated in secondary (public) schools, he dropped his “h’s” and “g’s” in the west country fashion. Bevin would have said “G’ ta ’ell man.” Thus, someone other than Bevin must have told the constable where to go. Colville was too junior, Pug Ismay too polite. Only one suspect remained. In any event, the group motored onward to the park, where they found the big guns silent. It was raining, and, with no German aircraft overhead, Churchill stopped by the officers’ mess, where he sipped a whisky and soda and awaited ...

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want… which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point… that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any

neighbor—anywhere in the world…. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them…. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

“How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.” His words cast their own shadows, and they were long and deep. Certainly he demonstrated that powerful words could alter the course of history.

the Führer’s decision to “vent his personal spite against a small country that had dared to defy him was probably the single most catastrophic decision of Hitler’s career.” This was so because, unless Hitler crushed the Russians by late October, Russia’s most fearsome ally would appear on the battlefield: winter.215

St. James’s Palace, where Churchill’s parents had moved in 1880, was burning. Austin Thompson, the vicar of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, stepped out onto the steps of his church to call people in to shelter; a bomb erased both the vicar and his church from the cityscape.

But for these few exceptions to Hitler’s rule, the entire map of Europe had gone black. All, that is, but the obstinate Island.

Not for nothing had Churchill’s dearest friend, F. E. Smith (the late Lord Birkenhead), once said that Churchill spent his entire life rehearsing his impromptu remarks.

Now Churchill wanted tanks, for Stalin, who Beaverbrook believed could survive if reinforced rapidly and heavily enough. Beaverbrook produced the tanks and in coming months persuaded the Americans to produce more, thousands more.

My dear friends, this is your hour…. There we stood, alone. Did anyone want to give in? [The crowd shouted “No.”] Were we down-hearted? [“No!”] The lights went out and the bombs came down. But every man, woman and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle. London can take it. So we came back after long months from the jaws of death, out of the mouth of hell, while all the world wondered. When shall the reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail? I say that in the long years to come not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straight forward and die if need be—unconquered.’