1. (February 13, 2019, Chapters 1-3) First off, Roberts loves Churchill, no question, but he is not blind to his faults and he's not about to let any reader of his book be blind to them, either, in which pursuit he lets Churchill speak for himself much of the time. On the issue of women voting, the young Churchill was profoundly chauvinist, arguing that 'only the most undesirable class of women are eager for the right,' and that 'Those women who discharged their duty to the state viz. marrying and giving birth to children, are adequately represented by their husbands...' Churchill's comments on the Talib (later the Taliban) and Islamic fundamentalism after his service in India are so clearly illustrative of Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." that all Americans can do is read them and weep. After standing for Parliament once and losing, Churchill wins his second contest. Roberts writes Before the new MP had even taken his seat, he had fought in four wars, published five books...written 215 newspaper and magazine articles, participated in the greatest cavalry charge in half a century and made a spectacular escape from prison. 2. (February 17, 2019, Chapters 4-8) Churchill? Was a progressive. He shouldn't have been. He was born in a ducal mansion in the age of Victoria, a child of Empire who was convinced of the rightness and privilege and power of that Empire. He lived a life of privilege, too, even when he couldn't pay for it. But I don't know what other than "progressive" you would call someone who charged into Parliament at the age of 25 and *worked to lose the House of Lords their right of veto over bills passed by the House of Commons, said House of Lords containing many of his own relatives In 1910 he became Home Secretary, where he reviewed death sentences and commuted half of them, worked for prison reform and got it, sent 300 Metropolitan Police officers, armed only with rolled up raincoats, to disperse a riot in Tonypandy in Wales (every reader of Josephine Tey will thrill to that passage), and still found time to marry Clementine Hozier, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the vote for women. She wrote to The Times in opposition to the anti-suffragist sentiment in the Letters to the Editor. The question seems no longer to be "Should women have votes?" but "Ought women not to be abolished altogether?" I'd like to read her biography, too. In 1911 he became First Lord of the Admiralty and swept down on that unfortunate organization like Hurricane Winston, cleaning house of bad admirals and bad policy in equal measure. He had his eye on Germany, who were building a very large, very modern navy very quickly, and he started England building ships, lots of them. This left him open to charges of warmongering by his enemies, of which he had by then many, and whose opprobriums against him read like an Edwardian Twitter feed. Lloyd George told newspaper proprietor Sir George Riddell, somewhat scornfully, that all Churchill could ever think about was how to sink the German Fleet as soon as war broke out. Uh, yeah, pretty sure that's how you win wars. But at the same time Churchill was building ships he offered Kaiser Wilhelm no less than three opportunities for both nations to together stand down their arms races, and was refused every time. Roberts writes ...if Churchill had died before 1939 he would principally be known as the man who got the Royal Navy ready for the Great War. Progressive or not, his assumption of white racial and in particular British superiority was unquestionable, at least thus far in his life. ...Churchill's assumption of white racial superiority was palpable throughout his articles and subsequent book, My African Journey....That the local people had their own religions, tribal dress and systems of morality and justice did not seem to occur to him...Churchill felt a genuine and profound sense of paternalist duty towards the natives of the British Empire. But progressive he undoubtedly also was. No one is ever only one thing, and Churchill contained multitudes.
*opposed tariffs, writing 'High protective tariffs, although they might increase the profits of capital, are to the poor and the poorest of the poor a cursed engine of robbery and oppression.'
*believed in Free Trade (Part of Churchill's belief in Free Trade was based on the widespread conviction that it promoted world peace.(See the Golden Arches Doctrine.)
*opposed the Aliens Bill in 1904 which was intended to restrict the immigration into Britain of Jews escaping from pogroms in Tsarist Russia.
*introduced labor exchanges, where unemployed workers were put in touch with potential employers.
*won a half-holiday for shop workers
*helped push through an Old Age Pensions Act in 1908, five shillings each (£23 today) for 600,000 old people ('It is not much,' Churchill was to say of the very modest pension provision, 'unless you have not got it.')
*with Lloyd George introduced unemployment insurance
*reduced coal miners' work days to eight hours
*improved mine safety
*increased taxes, even and especially on the wealthy
3. (March 10, 2019, Chapters 9-11)
While Roberts doesn't try to hide Churchill's faults, he does spend what feels sometimes like an inordinate amount of time explaining them away, and never fails to point out the moral of the story afterward. Hence the entire chapter on Gallipoli.
Referring to the expedition as 'a legitimate war gamble' allowed detractors for ever afterwards to allege that [Churchill's] gambler's instinct had led him to gamble away men's lives, and indeed there is no getting away from the terrible losses. The British Empire killed and wounded numbered 114,743, of whom 21,882 died in action and 8,899 in hospital. The French had 17,235 recorded burials.
And then, inevitably, Roberts goes on to say
The Dardanelles debacle taught Churchill a great deal that was to stand him in excellent stead during the Second World War..."I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes,' Churchill wrote to Clementine soon after resigning. He had made colossal mistakes during the Dardanelles debacle, but the lessons he learned from them were of immense value a quarter of a century later.
Churchill was forced from government and then, astonishingly, went to serve under fire on the Western Front in the 2nd Battalion of the Grenadier Guards.
One of its officers, Harold Macmillan, later recalled that 'There was great opposition to "the damned politician", but in two days he had won them all over.'
It's easy to see why.
...Churchill found a sentry asleep at his post. 'I frightened him dreadfully but did not charge him with the crime,' he told Clementine. 'He was only a lad...the penalty is death or at least two years.' Instead, he kept watch so that others could sleep...He quickly got his section of the line dry with boarded and drained trenches, and provided his men with thick parapets, good wire and clear fields of fire.
As well as, because Churchill, many other good soldier practices and a few bad ones, like taking part in over 30 officers' patrols in the 300 yards of no man's land, a job well below his pay grade, at times getting close enough to hear the German troops talking. Fun fact: At one point he and Adolf Hitler were ten miles across the front lines from each other. If only.
He was recalled to government as the Minister of Munitions, where he immediately began to remediate the Allies' chronic undersupply of bullets and bombs and gas. By now he had learned to fly, a manifestation of his eternal curiosity into the all! new! and improved! technology rolling over the industrial landscape, all of which he was determined to adapt to Britain's military benefit as quickly as possible. But not quickly enough for the dead.
One in ten British men between the ages of twenty and forty-five had died in the war, some 744,000, as well as 14,600 merchant seamen, and 1,000 civilians. A further 150,000 Britons died of Spanish influenza that winter.
Probably about thirty seconds after the Armistice Churchill set about writing a five-volume history of the Great War.
'No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion,' [Churchill] wrote. 'No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.'
It also engendered an antipathy for war in that part of Europe still standing that caused the survivors to wilfully ignore the growing threat of fascism and Adolf Hitler in Germany and communism and Stalin in Russia. Churchill almost alone among his contemporaries saw the danger, but it would be years before people stopped shouting "What about the Dardanelles?" at him during public speeches, and his determination to speak truth to power would very nearly end his career.
4. (March 10, Chapters 12-18)
Following the war he prophesied disaster at the harsh provisions levied against Germany in the Versailles Treaty.
He instead urged the humane treatment of Germany, warning of the 'grave consequences for the future' should the Russians and Germans ever come together.
No one was listening. In the meantime, he helped Gertrude Bell and Lawrence of Arabia redraw the Middle East into political entities that would favor British oil contracts, supported the return to the Gold Standard (what he later stigmatized as the greatest blunder of his life), started writing screenplays and made a pretty good living at it, went on another, very lucrative lecture tour of Canada and the US.
'We realize one hundred million pounds sterling a year from our liquor taxes,' Churchill told the Appleton Post-Crescent newspaper, 'which I understand you give to your bootleggers.'
and was actually on Wall Street on Black Monday and lost a ton of money playing the stock market.
He was in and out of government and then in 1931, finally, thoroughly, and completely out (almost) when he would not support Dominion status for India, not thinking those Hindus yet fit for self-governance. ("India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.")
Now he was in what was called the Wilderness, those years when he served as a back bencher. At one point he had only three supporters in Parliament, and then one of them died. During this time he wrote his biography of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough.
The one-million-word book, published in four volumes between 1933 and 1938, took him as long to research and write as it took Marlborough to fight the War of Spanish Succession...For Churchill, writing history was a natural adjunct to making it.
Roberts adds
The breadth of Churchill's hinterland -- his many and varied interests beyond politics -- meant that he could regard politics with more detachment than most professional politicians, and thus not make the compromises others did in order to gain, or remain in, office.
Good thing, too, because Churchill in an act of monumental stupidity and self-harm vociferously supported Edward VIII's marriage to Wallis Simpson, which only gave his enemies more ammunition to use against him. At the same time Hitler was busy consolidating power at home in massive rearmament, the Night of the Long Knives, and creating the Luftwaffe in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and eventually abroad on the march into the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Churchill sounded the alarm again and again and was not believed, a modern-day Cassandra. Roberts writes
One of the reasons why Churchill became prime minister in 1940 was that, although few had heeded his speeches, many others remembered that he had made them.
Given the number of times the Western powers could have pushed back on Hitler and that they never chose to do so until it was almost too late, later Churchill would call World War II "the unnecessary war." Europe's determination to remain oblivious to the threat makes for exceedingly frustrating reading today.
And then on August 23, 1939, Hitler made a pact with Russia which handed Russia the Baltic states and half of Poland. This cleared the way for Hitler to invade the other half, while Chamberlain went fishing in Scotland. Parliament was recalled on August 24th, but it took Chamberlain until September 3rd to declare the nation at war, when he offered Churchill "the position of first lord of the Admiralty with a seat in the War Cabinet."
It was about damn time.
5. (April 7, 2019, Chapters 19-31)
And it was nearly too late. For almost two years the news was almost uniformly bad, from Dunkirk to the London Blitz to Tobruk, leavened by very few bright spots like the Battle of Britain, which inspired one of Churchill's most famous speeches ('Never was so much owed by so many to so few').
No fewer than 1,733 Luftwaffe planes were shot down over England between 10 July and 31 October 1940, at the cost of 915 RAF fighters.
Churchill, in discussion with his Home Secretary, says
'It is striking that none of the aristocracy chose the R.A.F. -- they left it to the lower-middle class...The P.M. then waxed eloquent on the disappearance of the aristocracy from the stage and their replacement by these excellent sons of the lower-middle classes*.’
But for the moment, Britain was up against it all alone. That moment lasted until 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia in June and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December. Once an endless supply of American matériel and a seemingly endless supply of Russian soldiers for cannon fodder on the Eastern Front (In the calendar year 1943, when 70,000 Western servicemen, including bomber crews, died fighting Germany, two million Russian soldiers were killed, nearly thirty times the number.) were made available, victory, which Churchill had been claiming unwaveringly all along, was finally assured. It would only take another three and a half years.
The war hadn’t even ended when Churchill’s party was turned out of office in April. Roberts writes
Apart from Churchill himself the Tories had nothing genuinely popular to offer.
Churchill resigned as prime minister on May 23, 1945.
*Those "lower-middle classes" fought and bled and died for the Empire for six years and at that twice in forty years, and they understandably wanted a fairer share of that Empire on the other end.
6. (April 7, Chapters 32-Conclusion)
Churchill was 70 years old by then but he couldn’t bring himself to retire, so he took his place as leader of the opposition. Because Churchill, he wrote the six-volume The Second World War in his spare time. In March 1946 he gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri.
The reaction was immediate and almost unanimously denunciatory…The press, not just on the left, was overwhelmingly negative in both Britain and America, let alone elsewhere…Churchill was generally accused of being a reactionary warmonger who failed to appreciate the Russian sacrifices in the war, and the essentially benevolent nature of ‘Uncle Joe.’
‘Warmonger,’ again. And he was right, again. A prophet has no honor in his own country, even if he did just save it.
As majority governments inevitably do, the opposition eventually overreached itself, and a month away from 77 years of age Churchill became prime minister again in October 1951. He summed up his agenda as ’Houses and meat and not being scuppered’ and finally managed to end rationing in 1954, nine years after the end of the war. In 1952 he saw in the reign of Queen Elizabeth the II.
’I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking, once more, the prayer and the anthem, “God Save the Queen!”’
He was more or less forced from office in April 1955, but it was time, and he enjoyed most of the decade that followed, finishing and publishing “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which he had put aside back in 1939 to fight a war, and talking long trips on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht. He died on January 9, 1965. He would have enjoyed his own funeral, featuring nine military bands and a flyby of 16 RAF aircraft, which was watched on television by 350 million people worldwide.
Churchill was the last aristocrat to rule Britain,’ Roberts writes. …he was the first significant political figure to spot the twin totalitarian dangers of Communism and Nazism, and to point out the best ways of dealing with both…. Above all, Churchill was a student of history, in particular of British history, and always used the past to inform the present. And then there were his unparalleled gifts of writing and of speech, without which it could be fairly said that World War II could not have been won.
One could even say Churchill wrote his way to victory.
****
Note: There’s a story in this book about how Clementine had to take occasional vacations from being married to Winston, he being so energetic and challenging and exhausting a companion. He was all those things to this reader on the page, too, and I had to take frequent vacations from him of my own. You have been warned.
