September 11, 2013

Finest Hour 104, Autumn 1999

Page 12

By WINSTON S. CHURCHILL


FOR my part, there is no query about the title of this address, but I realise that some may have some alternative candidates. You may say I am biased and, of course, you would be right. There are many eminent candidates for “Man of the Millennium,” from Shakespeare to Napoleon, from Leonardo to Einstein and, in the league of monsters, from Hitler to Stalin. But I advance my proposition with force and conviction on the basis that, in the greatest war of history, no single individual made a greater contribution to turning the tide of victory and securing a favourable outcome than Winston Churchill. On that basis, I am hopeful that, before you hear me out, I may have persuaded some of the waverers among you to my point of view.

The critical moment came in May and June of 1940, when the fate of Europe—indeed of the whole world—hung in the balance. At dawn on 10th May, Hitler launched his blitzkrieg against Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. That very day the British nation, in its hour of crisis, turned to Winston Churchill as its leader. Within six weeks all effective resistance to the Nazi onslaught was at an end and many, even among the friends of Britain overseas, believed that it would only be a matter of weeks before Britain, too, surrendered.

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As France was falling, one French General declared: “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” This prompted my grandfather, when addressing the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa on 30 December 1941, to make his famous quip: “Some chicken, some neck!”

Viewed objectively, Britain’s position was hopeless. Hitler had amassed a huge war-machine, out-producing Britain in almost every field of military production by a factor of two or even three to one. Europe was at his mercy. Soviet Russia was his ally. Only 21 miles of English Channel stood between him and his next intended conquest. The mood at home was divided.

Even after Churchill became Prime Minister there were many Members of Parliament, and even a handful of Ministers, who favoured a “negotiated settlement” with Hitler. Of course it would have been dressed up as a Peace Agreement, but it would have amounted to surrender, with the dismantling of both the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Had this come about, Hitler would have been free to turn East with all his might to defeat Stalin’s Russia. Then he would have turned West once again and all the apparatus of Nazi domination—concentration camps and death-camps—would have been established in England’s green and pleasant land.

All prospect of eventual liberation would be extinguished, for it would have been impossible for our friends in the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to mount a D-Day invasion from 3000 miles across the Atlantic. In such circumstances it is quite possible that, to this day, the Nazi swastika would be flying over London and the capital cities of Europe.

Churchill’s strength as a war leader rested in his burning conviction, in the teeth of all the odds, that in our Island, we were unconquerable. Second, and equal to that, was his ability to communicate that spirit of resolution to the British nation. In the words of the American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, later reiterated by President John F. Kennedy, Churchill “mobilised the English language, and sent it into battle.” His wartime speeches at that turning point of history were as remarkable as they are memorable.

In his first address to Parliament, on becoming Prime Minister, he declared:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat….You ask what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war by sea, land and air with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road will be; for without victory, there is no survival..

Within five weeks France had fallen and Hitler was free to direct all his might against Britain. In his speech to the House of Commons of 18 June, Churchill warned:

What Gen. Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. 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. Hider knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose me 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 that 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.”

Of all the words which must forever move English and French hearts, none could be more powerful than the closing words of his broadcast to the French in 1940:

Goodnight then: sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine upon the brave and the true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of the heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France! Long live also the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age.

When, later, he reflected upon the momentous day, 10 May 1940, when he had become Prime Minister, Churchill recalled his feelings, as he went to bed in the early hours: “I was conscious of a profound sense of relief…I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”

Of all the remarkable qualities of Winston Churchill there is none more amazing than his unshakable belief in his destiny. As a young man he once confided to Violet Asquith: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm!” Indeed, even before that, while still a schoolboy at Harrow, he had already developed a keen sense of his purpose here on earth. When, years later in the late 1950s, it was announced that my late father Randolph would write the official biography of his father, Sir Murland Evans, a school-fellow of my grandfather’s at Harrow wrote my father recalling a conversation he had had with the young Winston in 1891, when they were both just sixteen years old. As he remembered, “It was a summer’s evening in one of those dreadful basement rooms in the Headmaster’s House, a Sunday evening, to be exact, after chapel evensong.” Murland Evans had been stunned by their conversation and recorded it with the utmost clarity. I should like to share his recollection:

We frankly discussed our futures. After placing me in the Diplomatic Service, perhaps because of my French descent from Admiral de Grasse who was defeated by Lord Rodney in the Battle of the Saints, 1782; or alternatively in finance, following my father’s career, we came to his own future. “Will you go into the army?” I asked. “I don’t know, it is probable, but I shall have great adventures beginning soon after I leave here.”

“Are you going into politics? Following your father?”

“I don’t know, but it is more than likely because, you see, I am not afraid to speak in public.”

“You do not seem at all clear about your intentions or desires.”

“That may be, but I have a wonderful idea of where I shall be eventually. I have dreams about it.”

“Where is that?”

“Well, 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.”

“How can you talk like that? We are for ever safe from invasion, since the days of Napoleon.”

“I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future. This country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion, by what means I do not know, but [warming to his subject] I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and England from disaster.”

“Will you be a general then, in command of the troops?”

“I don’t know; 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, to save the Empire.”

Preposterous talk from a teenager, you may say; but, as it turned out, incredibly prescient. Armed with this belief in his destiny, he seems to have concluded that he was bullet-proof and, after graduating from Harrow to Sandhurst, he proceeded to launch himself into a military career with an almost complete lack of regard for his personal safety.

At the age of 20, he was commissioned in die 4th Hussars. Months before, his father had died, and with a glamorous and extravagant mother, he was left penniless to make his way in the world on his own devices. He had a burning ambition and determination to enter politics to vindicate the memory of his father, who had died at the young age of 46 after a brilliant but doomed career.

IN those days entering politics required either money or fame. Not having the former he determined to secure the latter. He made it his business, using all the influences at his command—most especially that of his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill—to seek out wars wherever they were to be found with the aim of earning a reputation for bravery. Thus in 1895, on his 21st birthday, he was in Cuba observing the Cuban revolt against Spain, tasting enemy fire for the first time when a bullet flew between him and the drumstick of a chicken he was about to swallow, prompting him to remark: “There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect.”

From there he went to the North West Frontier of India where he saw action with the Malakand Field Force; while everyone else took cover, he calmly paraded along the skirmish line on his white charger in view of the enemy. Then in 1898 with the 21st Lancers, he took part in one of the last great cavalry charges of history at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of my grandfather’s birth and, indeed, the centenary of his imprisonment in Pretoria, following his capture by the Boers, in the Armoured Train incident of which he gave such a lively and vivid account in London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and My Early Life. Heedless of personal danger and with bullets flying all around, he managed to extricate the locomotive, enabling it to get away, loaded with the wounded on the coal tender. While confined in Pretoria he stood at a crossroads of his life. Just 25 years old, he was determined to escape. It was a throw of the dice whether he would buy a bullet from one of the guards manning the perimeter fence, or whether he would make good his escape and secure the fame for which he so unashamedly yearned. Fortunately for the world it was the latter and, by his dramatic escape he became the popular hero of the hour.

When one considers the number of occasions on which he hazarded his life, even after he resigned his commission and entered Parliament at the age of 26 in 1900 — walking out of the wreck of a crashed airplane in the earliest days of aviation, serving in the trenches of Flanders where he commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in the line in 1917, and again when he was knocked down by a New York taxi in 1930—one cannot help but reflect that his preservation through all these hazards was nothing short of miraculous.

But as remarkable as his firm belief in his own destiny was the incredible roller-coaster of his political career, which spanned 55 years from his election to Parliament in 1900, aged 26 in the reign of Queen Victoria, to the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the thermonuclear age. On no fewer than four occasions his political career hit rock-bottom and was judged by many to be finished. But each time he climbed back from the abyss, defying those who had prematurely written his political obituary.

Marked out at an early age as a future Prime Minister, he rose rapidly to be Home Secretary at 34, and First Lord of the Admiralty at 36, where responsibility fell to him to prepare the Fleet for war against Germany. But then, in 1915, he became the scapegoat for the failure of the Dardanelles landings, and there was a general conviction that his political career was over. Thereupon he went into the trenches as a soldier in Flanders. Within two years, he was back again under Lloyd George, first as Minister of Munitions and then Colonial Secretary until, in 1922 with the fall of the Liberal Government, as he put it: “In the twinkling of an eye I found myself without an office, without a seat, without a party and without an appendix.”

After two more years in the political wilderness, he was back in Parliament, back in politics, back in the ranks of the Conservative Party and—to the amazement of all, not least himself—Chancellor of the Exchequer. But then in 1929, following the defeat of the Tories, he found himself cast into the wilderness—this time for fully ten years, during which he became increasingly alienated from his party over the rearmarament of Germany. It was this defeat that prompted his lengthy journey across Canada and America and led him to write to his wife: “Only one goal still attracts me, and if that were barred, I should quit the dreary field of politics for pastures new.”

These ten years in the wilderness were, undoubtedly, the toughest period of his life. He saw with the utmost clarity the looming danger and tried, desperately, to warn the world before it was too late—but all in vain. It was only just before the outbreak of war in 1939 that he was invited to resume his old post at the Admiralty. There it fell to him for the second time in a quarter-century to prepare the Fleet for war. When he became Prime Minister the following year he was already 65 years of age and qualified to draw the old age pension. After six long years of war, during which he led Britain and the world to Victory over Hitler, he was abruptly cast aside by the British electorate. Then, against all the odds, in 1951—at the age of 76—he made his fourth and final comeback from the politically dead, becoming Prime Minister again and remaining in office into his 81st year.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday in 1954, looking back on the wartime years, he replied reflectively to the congratulations of his colleagues of all parties: “I have never accepted what many people have kindly said, namely, that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless, and as it proved, unconquerable. It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had to the luck to be called upon to give the roar!”

It is with a sense of awe that one considers his remarkable life and his brilliant achievements. By the time of his death at the age of 90, he had published some fifty volumes of history, biography and speeches. At his beloved home of Chartwell in Kent there were nearly 500 canvasses that he had painted, some of remarkable quality. In addition he built, largely with his own hands, three cottages and a high wall round his extensive vegetable garden. And to think that, in between, he managed to find the time to beat the daylights out of Hitler….

His was a remarkable life to which none can hold a candle. When I call him “Man of the Millennium,” I do so with deliberation and conviction. Imagine for an instant how different the world would be today if the Nazi Swastika still floated over London and all the capital cities of Europe. It does not bear thinking about. But it is on that basis that I salute Winston Churchill as the Man of the Millennium. And I venture  to think that I am not alone. 


Mr. Churchill is a Trustee of The Churchill Center. He has been a writer and lecturer for his entire career, which also includes 27 years as a Member of Parliament. This is the text of a speech he made during his recent American book signing tour.

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