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December 22, 2023 - January 7, 2024
And in his most famous cut of Baldwin, he said, “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.”
Reading, for Churchill, was a form of action.
There was another, buff-colored box. Only Churchill had the key to that one. Inside were German military orders—at first from the Luftwaffe, later from the Wehrmacht and the SS, and much later from Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats—all decoded and translated for him. In the first days of the war, Polish intelligence officers had captured a German electromagnetic cipher machine; Polish mathematicians subsequently examined the machine and smuggled a replica to the British. The British cryptographers, stationed at Bletchley Park, a Victorian redbrick, white-trimmed, and copper-roofed complex north of
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He believed, with F. G. Fowler, that big words should not be used when small words will do, and that English words were always preferable to foreign words.
John Gielgud was King Lear;
1940
Churchill also worked a challenge to Hitler into his address: “When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone, ‘There are bitter weeds in England.’ There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.”82 None were more bitter than Churchill.
"None were more bitter than Churchill" Nice little flourish by the authors.
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.
Brooke added an observation, variations of which would find their way into his diary for the next five years: “He [Churchill] is full of offensive thoughts for the future.”
He emphasized that the great invasion scare (which we only ceased to deride six weeks ago) is serving a most useful purpose: it is well on the way to providing us with the finest offensive army we have ever possessed and it is keeping every man and woman tuned to a high pitch of readiness. He does not wish the scare to abate therefore, and although personally he doubts whether invasion is a serious menace he intends to give that impression, and to talk about long and dangerous vigils, etc., when he broadcasts on Sunday.
He was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. In retrospect, “Stuffy” Dowding—as anointed by his fliers—is seen as the true hero of the Battle of Britain, though his contemporaries were slow to realize it. One reason lay in the nature of the man. He was a difficult man to like. Ever since Trafalgar, Britons had expected their military heroes to be Nelsons, and Dowding was far from that. Tall, frail, and abstemious, he was a bird-watching widower whose career had suffered from tactlessness, unorthodox views, and a remarkable lack of social graces.
Beaverbrook lamented, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen.” Beneath it Churchill wrote, “I do.”
Having failed to identify the danger of the German beams in his capacity as defender of the air, Tizard offered to resign. Churchill declined, and instead sent Tizard off to the United States—out of sight, out of mind—as head of a small delegation of British scientists. Their mission to explore the exchange of new technologies with the Americans emerged as one of the most critical successes of science and diplomacy during the war.
Churchill had long warned anyone who listened that science—for good or ill—would win the war, and in the end he was proven correct. But the “Wizard War,” as Churchill termed it, was at first fought as desperately between his wizards—Lindemann and Tizard—as between his wizards and those of Hitler’s.
Wavell—shy, tongue-tied Wavell—considered just months earlier by Churchill to be somewhat “dumb,” became his hero of the hour. Churchill learned that Wavell had written two books; knowing neither the titles nor the subject matter, he ordered Colville to locate the volumes. It seems the reticent Wavell was a poet, historian, and biographer as well as a fighter.
The lyrics of the German war song “Wir fahren, wir fahren, wir fahren gegen Engeland” (“We are marching, marching, marching against England”), which had played over and over again on state radio the previous summer as the BEF was encircled at Dunkirk, had been revised: “Wir fahren, wir fahren, wir fahren, schon seit Jahren, mit langen weissen Haaren, gegen Engeland.”
The French accorded more importance to their personal grudges than to their national honor. The previous June, Weygand and Pétain had squandered their chance to fight for the honor of France. They had quit, but not before a final act of treachery when they tried to draw in the RAF’s last reserves.
He would get no help in the western Mediterranean from Vichy France. As Laval’s collaboration with the Nazis became ever more apparent, Churchill told Colville he rued the “lamentable lack of Charlotte Cordays.”
Mr. Churchill is the unchanging bulldog, the epitome of British aggressiveness and the living incarnation of the true Briton in fighting, not standing any damned nonsense, stoking the boilers with the grand piano and enjoying-it mood. Also he never lets go. He is so designed that he cannot breathe if he does. At the end of the fight he will come crawling in, unrecognizable, covered with blood and delighted, with the enemy’s heart between his teeth.
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
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Roosevelt, in spite of tremendous political risk and strong popular dissent, considered it to be in America’s interest to aid Britain and, of more immediate political concern, judged his countrymen ready to join him in taking that step.
Not only would this special unit function without oversight, but in Dalton’s estimation, the success of its future operations depended on “a certain fanatical enthusiasm.”70 Churchill heartily embraced the scheme. If fanaticism proved necessary in the battle against Hitlerism, then let the mayhem commence. If it did not prove effective, Dalton and his socialist friends could take the blame. In July 1940 Churchill summoned Dalton to join him and the “usual nocturnal visitors”—the Prof and Bracken—to work things up. Over dinner and drinks Churchill asked Dalton to head “a new instrument of war,”
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The origin of SOE.
That night, after dinner at the Station Hotel, Hopkins lifted his glass in a toast that was to become one of the best remembered of the twentieth century. “I suppose you wish to know,” he began, “what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well, I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books… ‘Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgeth, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’” Then, he quietly added, “Even to the end.” Churchill was in tears. Hopkins’s words, Dr. Wilson noted in his diary, “seemed like a rope thrown to a dying man.”
Ruth 1:16-17.
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.
in fact, the only thing Churchill had in writing from the president was the Atlantic Charter, which was, if nothing else, an eight-barbed hook on which Roosevelt could reel in empires, evil or benign.
Churchill, in his memoirs, titles the chapter devoted to December 1941 “Pearl Harbor!” His use of an exclamation point is not meant to underscore the shock to America of the devastating Japanese attack on its naval base, but to underscore his profound relief. He wrote that late on the seventh, a thought took shape: “So we had won after all.”
Hitler’s decision was equivalent to Roosevelt taking over day-to-day operations from Marshall, or Churchill supplanting Brooke. But whereas a peevish Hitler squelched dissent, Churchill (himself often peevish) fostered an often-fractious give-and-take between himself and his generals, with the result that decisions taken were made stronger by having been annealed in the furnace of debate.
Spring brought no relief to Russian civilians, who had so far had the worst of it, especially in Leningrad, where, under siege since late August and lacking coal, food, and oil, more than two hundred thousand perished by early May. Hitler had ordered the complete destruction of the city and its nine million inhabitants, including six million refugees who had fled the countryside for the supposed safety of Leningrad. The Wehrmacht was ordered not to accept a surrender if one was offered. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich managed to escape with his family and a suitcase that contained his almost
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“Let me, however, make this clear…. We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” In uttering those words Churchill appeared to have confirmed for critics, then and since, his status as an outdated imperialist who either could not see or could not abide a simple truth—the age of European colonialism was just about over, its expiration aided and abetted by Franklin Roosevelt. Yet Churchill’s next line, infrequently noted, completed his thought: “For that task, if it were prescribed, someone else would have
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Of Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “He’s very human and I like him, tho’ I don’t want him to control the peace.”
“God knows where we would be without him,” Brooke had written in his diary at the close of 1941, “but God knows where we shall go with him.”
For more than two years, Britons had merrily sung “The Lambeth Walk” (which Berlin radio called “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping”) as they scrambled down into the Underground when the sirens wailed.
Churchill later told his old friend Violet Bonham Carter, “I realized at Tehran for the first time, what a small nation we are. There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one, the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.”
From this amphibious ill-borne mob began That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
Bell Laboratories manufactured an electronic gun director that measured the speed, course, and altitude of aircraft, along with wind direction and muzzle velocity of the anti-aircraft shells. The final calculation determined the altitude at which the proximity fuses of the anti-aircraft shells were set to burst. All of these calculations, and the automatic aiming and firing of the guns, were performed by a component of the system that Bell called the “computer.”
From Brooke’s standpoint, Churchill’s vision, both military and political, had often not been acute; now it was failing utterly. “Life has a quiet and peaceful atmosphere about it now that Winston is gone [to Italy]!” he told his diary that week. “Everything gets done twice as quickly.” He added: “I feel we have now reached the stage that for the good of the nation and the good of his own reputation it would be a godsend if he [Churchill] could disappear out of public life. He has probably done more for this country than any other human being has ever done,” yet “I am filled with apprehension
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Had Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the British liaison to the American Chiefs, been present, he might have guided Marshall to a more precise statement of intent and mediated Marshall’s growing dislike of the supercilious Brooke.
If Homer were writing this story, "supercilious" would be Alan Brooke's epithet.
Had Churchill and Stalin scrutinized a map at Tehran when they first proposed shifting Poland westward toward the Oder (and checked off their acceptance as they had with the “naughty” memo in October 1944, when they divided the Balkans into spheres of influence), they might have avoided the current predicament. And had Roosevelt displayed resolve at Yalta rather than, as described by Eden, “playing it by ear,” a more concise accord might have been reached. And, had Harry Hopkins been on hand in his role as presidential fixer, he might have guided Truman to more resolve.
The authors do a lot of this counterfactual speculation, saying that history would have come out better if people had acted differently than they in fact did. I'm not onboard with it.
The Cold War, as it soon came to be known, had had its start before World War Two ended, but soon enough—from Moscow to London to Washington and on around the globe—all agreed that it had been declared on March 5, 1946, by the Citizen of the World Without Portfolio, in Fulton, Missouri.
Churchill called the Marshall Plan “a turning point in the history of the world.” Almost $13 billion—about 5 percent of yearly U.S. gross domestic product, and 16 percent of the federal budget—would find its way to Europe over the next four years, including more than $1 billion a year to Britain. It was the embodiment of Churchill’s fourth moral principle, In Peace: Goodwill.
This attempt to give Churchill credit for the Marshall Plan leaves me cold.
Between mid-1945 and early 1950 Churchill delivered more than two hundred speeches, many quite lengthy. He dictated, polished, and delivered every one of the four hundred thousand words of his addresses—enough to fill a thousand-page volume—that he sent into battle against socialism, in defense of the Empire, and for European unity. It is an extraordinary achievement given that during these years, he was also writing his memoirs and fulfilling his duties as the leader of the Shadow Cabinet.
And late in 1959, he went to Cambridge, where he planted two oak trees and laid the foundation stone of Churchill College. At his behest, the Prof and Jock Colville had been raising subscriptions for the college since 1955, when Churchill, with MIT in mind, proposed that a similar institution for science and technology be built in Britain. Churchill contributed the first £25,000, and by the end of the decade, more than three million pounds had been raised. Churchill College opened in 1964. The charter contained a clause—suggested by Clementine and endorsed by Churchill—calling for the
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On one occasion Churchill phoned the doctor with the worrisome news that he had taken his temperature only to find it read sixty-six degrees. Montague Browne overheard Churchill’s end of the conversation: “What the hell do you mean, in that case I’m dead.” A long pause ensued, then, “Well, that is to say, ninety-six, but I would still like you to come around.”
on April 9, 1963, he watched with satisfaction as a live satellite feed from the Rose Garden of the White House brought him images of President Kennedy bestowing upon him, by Act of Congress, honorary U.S. citizenship. Churchill became the first person to be accorded the honor.
