It is one of the great coincidences of history that on Friday, May 10, 1940, the day Adolf Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg on the West, Winston Churchill obeyed an instruction to attend King George VI at Buckingham Palace in London, where he was asked to become prime minister. Yet it was a coincidence, because he had been chosen as Neville Chamberlain’s successor the previous afternoon, before the attack took place, and, therefore, without Hitler’s knowing whom his ultimate British adversary would be.
The king noted of that fateful evening that Churchill “was full of fire and determination to carry out the duties of Prime Minister.”1 Then, in the car coming back from Buckingham Palace, Churchill’s bodyguard Walter Thompson congratulated him, but said his task was enormous. “God alone knows how great it is,” the new prime minister replied.2 The third person Churchill spoke to about the job at the time was his wife, Clementine, to whom he said the next morning, “There is only one man who can turn me out and that is Hitler.”3 Years later he also told his doctor, “I could discipline the bloody business at last. I had no feeling of personal inadequacy, or anything of that sort.”4
The reasons that Churchill had “no feeling of personal inadequacy” was that he was a Victorian aristocrat born when the British upper classes were at the apex of the largest empire the world had ever seen, and in his background, education, and military career he genuinely felt no reason to feel inadequate about anything. He had been born in the grandest palace in England—not excluding the royal ones—was the grandson of a duke and not at all the dunce he self-deprecatingly made himself out to be in his autobiography My Early Life. Furthermore, he had already held several of the great offices of state and knew that he could fill the premiership, too, a post he had wanted ever since he entered politics more than four decades earlier.
He had been the youngest home secretary in seventy years, the First Lord of the Admiralty who had mobilized the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the Great War, minister of munitions when it employed two and a half million people and was easily the largest civilian employer in the British empire, and a chancellor of the exchequer who had delivered five annual budgets. He was sixty-five when he became prime minister, three years older than the age at which civil servants retired, and had delivered well over a thousand speeches. As he also put it in his war memoirs, “I thought I knew a good deal about it all, and I was sure I should not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams.”5
Before Churchill had even won his seat in Parliament at age twenty-five, he had already fought in 4 wars, published 5 books, written 215 newspaper and magazine articles, participated in the greatest cavalry charge in half a century, and made a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp. “At twenty-five he had fought in more continents than any soldier in history save Napoleon,” a contemporary profile of him was to state, “and seen as many campaigns as any living general.”6
Churchill’s upbringing had, like Napoleon’s, been consciously designed to produce someone who could lead men into battle. He had joined the officer training corps at school, had been required to learn the famous Harrow School songs, which were full of exhortations to patriotic deeds of valor, and then attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, whose whole ethos was to produce the kind of officer capable both of taking objectives under enemy fire and of planning and executing wider campaigns. As in Napoleon’s day, there was a thin dividing line between the military and politics: Plenty of soldiers entered the House of Commons when Churchill sat in it. Indeed, Churchill’s primary reason for joining the British Army was in order to make a name for himself through his bravery, which would allow him to woo a parliamentary constituency, as he did not have enough money to do so owing to his parents’ improvidence and his father’s early death.
Yet the other reason—indeed the key reason—that Churchill felt that he could “discipline the bloody business at last” and “had no feeling of personal inadequacy, or anything of that sort” was because he always believed that it was his destiny to one day save the British empire. As a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at Harrow, Churchill predicted to his friend Murland Evans:
I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world, great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger—London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London. . . . I see into the future. This country will be subjected, somehow, to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and England from disaster. . . . Dreams of the future are blurred but the main objective is clear. I repeat—London will be in danger and in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the capital and save the Empire.7
Churchill had mapped out precisely his destiny as a teenager and did not deviate from it until, aged sixty-five and considered by many—including Adolf Hitler—as a hopeless has-been, he came to power and walked with precisely the destiny that he had prescribed for himself half a century earlier.
It has long been assumed that it was his seemingly endless close brushes with death that made Churchill so certain that his destiny would protect him until such time as he could save London and England. For even if you strip out those very frequent near-death experiences during wars in which he deliberately put himself in danger, such as on the no fewer than thirty occasions when he ventured out into no-man’s-land in the trenches of the Great War, there were any number of other instances in peacetime when it seemed unlikely that he would live long enough to fulfill his destiny.
He was born two months premature. He was involved in three car crashes and two plane crashes. He was concussed for days after jumping thirty feet off a bridge, was staying in part of a house that burned to the ground in the middle of the night, very nearly drowned in Lake Geneva, was stabbed as a schoolboy, and had four serious bouts of pneumonia as well as a series of heart attacks. In retrospect the lack of an assassination attempt on his life was a curious oversight in an otherwise very dangerous life. He complained to Clementine that he found it difficult to buy life insurance, but on this occasion it is hard to sympathize with him.
“Sometimes when she scowls most spitefully,” Churchill wrote of the goddess Fortune, “she is preparing her most dazzling gifts.”8 Because he wrenched his shoulder jumping off the boat that took him to his first overseas official posting in India in 1896, for example—an injury that stayed with him for many years—he had to use his Mauser revolver rather than a sword during the famous charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman two years later. This allowed him to shoot four Dervishes at point blank range, including one who was trying to chop at the hamstrings of his horse with a scimitar. Being unhorsed in that melee, where the Lancers were outnumbered by ten to one, meant almost certain death: The regiment suffered almost 25 percent casualties.
It was partly Churchill’s extremely dangerous time on the Afghan-Pakistan border in 1896 and 1897, and in the Sudan in 1898, which had brought him up close to militant Islamic fundamentalism, that allowed him to spot the fanatical nature of Nazism that so many of his fellow politicians missed in the 1930s. Neville Chamberlain met Adolf Hitler three times, yet he utterly failed to notice the cold fanaticism of the Nazis and their creed, just seeing the Führer in classically British class terms as “the commonest little dog you ever saw.”9 Churchill never met Hitler, but having seen fanaticism in action earlier in his life, and remembering friends who had been butchered by Pashtun, Talib-ul-ilm, and Dervish tribesmen, he immediately spotted the same phenomenon in the Nazis.
The other essential feature in this was Churchill’s philo-Semitism. One of the good things he inherited from his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was that he was brought up to like, admire, and socialize with Jews, attitudes that were very unusual and different from those of the majority of the upper-class Victorians of his youth. Churchill, therefore, had an early warning mechanism that allowed him to recognize Hitler very early on as a malevolent force on the world scene. Clement Attlee said that in the House of Commons before the war, Churchill told him in tears about the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and Churchill never failed to denounce it. That was emphatically not the stance of most British politicians—of both the left and right—in the House of Commons at the time. “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?” Churchill asked Hitler’s publicist Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaengl when there was a chance of his meeting Hitler in Munich in 1932. “What is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?”10 Unsurprisingly, the meeting did not take place.
Although Churchill believed in an almighty, the role of the Supreme Being in his theology seems to have been primarily to look after the safety of Winston Churchill. Churchill did not believe Jesus Christ was divine, although he did think of him as a very wise and charismatic rabbi, who gave mankind what Churchill called “the last word in ethics.” In that sense, Churchill’s belief system, which he himself called the Religion of Healthy-Mindedness, was theologically a lot closer to Judaism than to the Anglican Church into which he was born. He joked that he saw his relationship to the Church of England as like a flying buttress, in that he supported it but from the outside. His belief system, therefore, tended to augment and support his sense of a personal destiny, which was in turn so important in his leadership.
Another important element in his belief system was his admiration for the British empire, which he thought to be a worthy successor to the great empires of the past and the chief glory of the British people in his own time. In his great wartime speeches of both world wars, he made regular references to the fact that the British people were not fighting merely for themselves, but for the native peoples of what he saw as the wider British family overseas, and vice versa. Here, too, his senses of duty and destiny intermingled. He was profoundly conscious, especially during the Second World War, of how the struggle was weakening the empire and its chances of survival, and at the end of his life—when colonies were given their independence across Asia and Africa—he considered himself to have been a failure for not having defended the empire more successfully.
Other than his philo-Semitism—which was to turn into fully fledged Zionism long before the Balfour Declaration of 1917—Churchill received little that was commendable or worthwhile from his father, who despised him and undercut him at every opportunity. Indeed, the more his father was aloof and disdainful toward him, the more Churchill seems to have worshipped him. Lord Randolph’s only other service to his son was to die at the age of forty-five, when Churchill was only twenty, allowing him to escape the stultifying influence of this mercurial, quick-witted, intellectually brilliant, unstable, controlling, and at times deeply unpleasant man. In a sense, Winston Churchill was striving to impress the shade of his missing father all his life, despite having received little from him but irritation and occasionally contempt.
Yet Churchill was to adopt his father’s Tory Democrat politics, many of his mannerisms, and several of his enmities. He wrote his father’s biography in two volumes, named his only son Randolph, and fantasized about meeting his father in a beautifully written essay titled “The Dream,” which he penned in 1947. When Churchill was finally financially solvent—which did not happen until he was seventy-three years old—he bought racehorses and dressed the jockeys in his father’s chocolate and pink racing colors.
“Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong,” Churchill wrote in his book The River War, “and a boy deprived of his father’s care often develops, if he escapes the perils of youth, an independence and vigour of thought which may restore in after life the heavy loss of early days.”11 Churchill was ostensibly writing of the Sudanese spiritual leader, the Mahdi, in that passage, but as in an extraordinary number of his writings and speeches, and even his eulogies for his friends, there was a good deal of self-reference, too.
Although Churchill was in tears when he spoke to Attlee about the fate of the German Jews, it must be noted that he was extraordinarily lachrymose much of the time. Tears welled up easily in his eyes; indeed, he used his lachrymosity as a political weapon on occasion, underlining for audiences the fact that he was genuinely overwhelmed with emotion. He could not make himself cry at will, but he could let himself be overcome by tears relatively easily if the occasion was suitably emotional. Churchill cried in public on no fewer than fifty occasions during the Second World War, for example. “I blub an awful lot, you know,” he told Anthony Montague Browne, his last private secretary. “You have to get used to it.”12 Montague Browne recalled that Churchill’s tears could be brought on by “tales of heroism. . . . A noble dog struggling through the snow to his master would inspire tears. It was touching, I found it perfectly acceptable.” Churchill considered his lachrymosity to be almost a medical condition, telling his doctor that he dated it to his defeat by forty-three votes in the St. George’s, Westminster, by-election of 1924. Yet there were plenty of times that he cried before that. A more accurate diagnosis was that he was an emotional, sentimental Regency aristocrat in a way that predated the Victorian stiff upper lip. Every admiral carrying Horatio Nelson’s coffin at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1806 was in tears, for example. When people watched Churchill cry they were not disconcerted—as one might be by the sight of a premier in tears today—but rather saw him as a leader who did not mind wearing his heart on his sleeve. During a visit to the London docklands during the Blitz in 1940, for example, Churchill’s chief of staff General Hastings Ismay heard an old woman say, “You see, he really cares: he’s crying.”13
Another classic example of Fortune scowling at Churchill when in fact she was preparing a dazzling gift came when he arrived in South Africa in October 1899 and tried to get into the town of Ladysmith. He was unable to do this because by then the Boers had cut the rail link over the Tugela River and were about to lay siege to the town. Once again, Churchill had been fortunate in his misfortune, because had he got into Ladysmith he would have been incarcerated there until its liberation three months later, instead of following the path that was to make him famous, to the ambushed train, and his subsequent prison escape. (The casualty rate for British soldiers in that ambush was 34 percent, even higher than at Omdurman.)
Churchill found time and again in politics that Destiny, Luck, Chance, Fate, or Providence—he tended to use them interchangeably when writing about them, which he did a lot—worked in his favor, even when they seemed to be working against him. He lost the by-election at Oldham in 1899 only by a whisker, for example. Had there not been a mere 2 percent swing to the Liberals, he would have squeaked into the House of Commons, so he would not have gone to South Africa and had the opportunity for making not just a local or national reputation for himself, but a truly international one just five months later.
In March 1931, Churchill wrote an article in the Strand Magazine titled “If I Lived My Life Again,” about all the twists his career had taken and how it might have gone otherwise. “If we look back on our past life,” he wrote, “we shall see that one of its most usual experiences is that we have been helped by our mistakes and injured by our most sagacious decisions.”14 He concluded in that Strand Magazine article, “Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. 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.”15
BY 1939, Churchill was in that penumbra between older politician and elder statesman, but he had not given up his hopes for the premiership, however unlikely it must have seemed. His following in the Commons could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and even Clementine no longer believed he would become prime minister. But crucially, he himself never lost hope. As well as foresight, his sheer level of self-belief was an essential part of his leadership and was evident for decades before the war broke out. As with other leaders in this book, failure was merely seen as a temporary setback that needed to be learned from, and then put behind you as you push on through.
Writing to Clementine from the trenches of World War I at the lowest point of his life, after the catastrophe of the Dardanelles when he had proposed a military campaign in Turkey that had failed miserably, Churchill wrote one of the most profound sentences of his prodigious literary output of six million words—with eight million spoken—when he said, “I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.”16 One of the frustrations about trying to analyze Churchill is that he always analyzed himself far better.
When Churchill was finally made prime minister in May 1940, the British had lost the war—comprehensively, according to every metric—but there was a huge difference between losing a war and realizing that one has lost it. This was all the more true when the country was now being led by an aristocratic English romantic, an historian and novelist who lived in a world populated by Elizabeth I, Francis Drake, Admiral Nelson, the dukes of Marlborough and Wellington, and other heroes and heroines who had first survived and then triumphed over various recurring Continental tyrannies. Winston Churchill’s primary duty in 1940 and 1941 was to prevent the British people from realizing that they had lost the war, and nobody did it better, not least because he utterly refused to accept the logic of the situation himself. The reasons he gave for optimism in his great speeches were barely credible, but in the end he was saved by Hitler’s invasion of Russia and six months later by the German declaration of war against the United States of America.
Even some of the British defeats early in the war can be put down as being a case of Fortune’s seeming to scowl spitefully even as she was preparing a dazzling gift. The most dazzling gift of World War II, the thing that killed 80 percent of all the Germans who died in battle during that conflict, was Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June 1941. Operation Barbarossa could have taken place six weeks earlier, but Churchill had supported the Yugoslavian uprising in late March and sent an expeditionary force to Greece. The Greeks were forced to capitulate on April 23, 1940, yet although Churchill’s support for the Yugoslavian coup and the intervention in Greece looked disastrous at the time, later on it seemed inspired, though not for any reason to do with British arms.
By August 1941, Churchill was telling his assistant private secretary, Jock Colville, that the Yugoslav coup “might well have played a vital part in the war,” in that it caused Hitler “to bring back his panzer divisions from the north and postponed for six weeks the attack on Russia.”17 He was supported in this assertion after the war by the senior German staff officer General Günther Blumentritt, who stated that “the Balkan incident postponed the opening of the [Russian] campaign by five-and-a-half weeks,” while another senior strategist, General Siegfried Westphal, put it at six.18 Since the Germans were unable to reach Moscow until the autumn, when Russia’s rainy season turned to a winter so cold that petrol froze and the Wehrmacht stalled outside the city, giving the Russians an opportunity for their counterattack in December, the iron law of unintended consequences had once more acted in Churchill’s favor.
When a Tory MP criticized Churchill for taking the risk of visiting the front only six days after D-Day, Brendan Bracken, the minister of information and the prime minister’s closest friend, gave a witty and impassioned reply, in which he said, “Neither the honourable and gallant Member nor anyone else can persuade the Prime Minister to wrap himself in cotton wool. He is the enemy of flocculence in thought, word or deed. Most humbly do I aver that, in years to come, a grateful and affectionate people will say that Winston Churchill was raised to leadership by destiny. Men of destiny have never counted risk.”19
Many times in his life Churchill’s failure to count risk had let him down. His inability to weigh risk and reward had often led him to disaster. But he learned from each mistake, which is truly the only thing that ultimately mattered. The Dardanelles catastrophe, for example, had taught him never to overrule the chiefs of staff during the whole of the Second World War. Meanwhile, those politicians who carefully weighed the risks and rewards recommended a path that, if we had followed it, might have led to the extinguishing of freedom—including in the United States—for centuries to come.
If Britain had fallen in 1940 and the Royal Navy—easily the most powerful navy in the world at the time—had been forced to join the German, Italian, and French navies, then the United States Navy could have done little to protect the eastern seaboard. The Americans could, therefore, not have entered the war, otherwise Miami, Charleston, Washington, DC, New York, Baltimore, and Boston would have been destroyed by naval bombardment. Instead of these nightmares’ coming to pass, there was a man who, aged sixteen, said, “I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and England from disaster.” This profound sense of destiny and capacity for war leadership meant that Winston Churchill was able to save not only London and England from disaster, but ultimately civilization itself.