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Because the campaign was ultimately to cost the British Empire over 114,000 battle casualties, for no strategic advantage whatever, we now know that the Council should have abandoned its strategy after this first disastrous day. But in late February Kitchener had declared, ‘The effect of a defeat in the Orient would be very serious.’12 It was felt that to admit defeat at the hands of a Muslim power would weaken the British Empire, which ruled over tens of millions of Muslims – and in India particularly prestige was more important than sheer military power. Since the Empire was Churchill’s
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The reverse side of Churchill’s unquestioning belief in the greatness of the British race – which so fortified him in the Second World War – was his dangerous assumption of the inferiority of other races, which served him very ill with regard to the Turks in 1915 and the Japanese in 1942.
speculatively. The diary entries published by Moran for 14 August 1944 and 2 August 1945, upon which almost all the evidence for Churchill’s ‘black dog’ has been based, do not correspond to the manuscript versions in his private papers.108
It is unlikely that Churchill was a depressive at all, let alone a manic one, and this sole reference of July 1911 can be explained in terms of an incorrect self-diagnosis,
What about Sarah comment prior to Potsdam and painting holiday.
Churchill also learned that it was sometimes better to cut one’s losses than massively to increase the stakes. So in Norway, Dakar, Greece and elsewhere – and especially with RAF fighter squadrons over France in mid-May 1940 – he vigilantly guarded against mission-creep, and disengaged without allowing considerations of prestige to suck him into deeper military commitments.
The absolute planlessness here makes one suspect a bigger plan elsewhere.’29 Now he was among others who
‘The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,’ he later wrote in The World Crisis; ‘the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’45
A collective ‘groupthink’ permeated the meeting of 13 January, encouraging optimism and discouraging incisive questioning,
Churchill considered two of Germany’s most egregious errors of the war to have been her invasion of Belgium, which precipitated Britain’s involvement, and her unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought in the United States three years later.
‘We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even if it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together. On that system and by that faith there has been built out of the wreck of the Roman Empire the whole of our existing civilization.’
‘Such eloquence is false because it is artificial: it is one of the pits into which a writer may fall if his conception of “fine writing” is not supported by an inner structure of fine thinking . . . the writer, suspecting the meanness of his theme, attempts to magnify it by grand phrases, thereby hoping to invest his own poor thoughts with the quality of this magnificence.’
Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination
This article anticipated Albert Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt about the possibility of a nuclear bomb by fifteen years, and the Nazis’ unmanned V-1 and V-2 missiles by even longer.
‘Anyone can rat,’ Churchill said of his becoming a Tory again, ‘but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.’
In the book, he asked the central question of the day, indeed of the European twentieth century: ‘Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe?’21
It must be observed that economic problems, unlike political issues, cannot be solved by any expression, however vehement, of the national will, but only by taking the right action. You cannot cure cancer by a majority.’
Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making. Once.’
‘Wireless telephones and television,’ he wrote, long before the commercial production of either, ‘following naturally upon their present path of development, would enable their owner to connect up with any room similarly installed, and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he had put his head in through the window.’ Then he added, ‘The congregation of men in cities would become superfluous.’
Under sufficient stress – starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold intellectual frenzy – the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up.
The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within . .
Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.
We are in the presence of a tyranny maintained by press and broadcast propaganda and the ruthless murder of political opponents.
‘The Muse of History must not be fastidious. She must see everything, touch everything, and, if possible, smell everything. She need not be afraid that these intimate details will rob her of romance and hero-worship. Recorded trifles and tittle-tattle may – and indeed ought – to wipe out small people. They can have no permanent effect upon those who have held with honour the foremost stations in the greatest storms.’
his research assistants, who by then included the Oxford-educated William Deakin, provided for him, and then dictate to a secretary in his study at Chartwell.
‘The greatest tie of all is language . . . Words are the only things that last forever.
The number of squadrons with these new fighter models increased from six to twenty-six. All this is sometimes held to justify the Munich Agreement, but it ignores what was happening in Germany. While Britain concentrated on bolstering her air defences, the German Army grew exponentially vis-à-vis the British, even after Britain introduced conscription in April 1939. The War Office estimated the German Army to number 690,000 in fifty-one divisions at the time of Munich. A year later, it had grown to 2,820,000 in 106 fully equipped divisions.
cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.
He ratted and re-ratted on his parties in the House of Commons, but his stance towards the USSR he changed no fewer than six times.
The letter of the law must not in supreme emergency obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement . . . Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.
In those cities and later across Occupied Europe, listening to Churchill’s broadcasts over the radio became punishable by death, yet still people listened, because he could provide that one thing these tortured populations needed more than anything else: hope.
‘There are two people who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot,’ he said. ‘You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.’112
the buoying up of morale, which of course was what Churchill was trying to do, is an essential part of waging war. ‘Is everything you tell us true?’ a young rating asked Churchill on board a battleship in 1940. ‘Young man,’ Churchill replied, ‘I have told many lies for my country and will tell many more.’
It was exceptionally ironic that, although it was Chamberlain who was most criticized for the defeat in Norway, the person who was more directly responsible for it – Churchill – was to benefit most.
all these were opportunities grasped, of acting first and leaving the consequences to take care of themselves.
‘The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy. Thus
His assault on Russia would have been enormously helped had he not needed to invade Britain’s allies, Yugoslavia and Greece, in April 1941: it would have given him two more months outside Moscow before the weather turned that autumn.
