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To
MARY
and
CHARTWELL
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
—JOHN F. KENNEDY on Theodore Roosevelt New York City, December 5, 1961
Lieutenant Winston S. Churchill, Subaltern of Horse, Fourth Hussars, 1896
ILLUSTRATIONS
Lieutenant Winston S. Churchill, 1896
Churchill among the ruins of the House of Commons
Churchill family genealogy
Lord Randolph Churchill at the time of his marriage
Lord Randolph in his prime
Invitation to a shipboard dance
Mrs. Jerome and her daughters
Jennie as drawn by John Singer Sargent
Blenheim Palace
Jennie in Ireland
Mrs. Everest
Two of Winston’s first letters
Winston at Harrow
Lord Randolph in later years
Jennie and two of her lovers
Lieutenant Winston Churchill in India
Jennie in her prime
Churchill in Cairo, 1898
Pamela Plowden
Churchill in his first campaign for Parliament
The armored-train ambush
From Churchill’s later version of the escape
Reward notice
Churchill addressing the crowd at Durban
Spy cartoon
Joseph Chamberlain
Arthur Balfour
Churchill in 1904
Clementine Hozier
Churchill and David Lloyd George
Winston and Jennie, 1912
Churchill and Kaiser Wilhelm
Churchill at British army maneuvers
Churchill and Lord Fisher
Churchill and Asquith
Churchill in pilot’s gear
A morning ride
F. E. Smith
Churchill at Antwerp
“Winston’s Folly”
Roger Keyes, John de Robeck, and Ian Hamilton
Lieutenant Colonel Churchill, 1916
Churchill in the summer of 1916
Sir Douglas Haig
Churchill in Egypt with T. E. Lawrence
Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith
Michael Collins
Churchill and Sir Henry Wilson
Austen Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin, and Churchill
Churchill playing polo with the Prince of Wales
Churchill with the Duke of Sutherland at Deauville
Winston having fun at the beach
Churchill with Mary at Chartwell
Two views of Chartwell
Churchill building a wall
Churchill building a snowman
Churchill in the garden at Chartwell
Work: In London
Play: At Chartwell
Churchill visits with Charlie Chaplin
Churchill entering the political wilderness
Adolf Hitler
Churchill leaving Lenox Hill Hospital
MAPS
The British Empire at Its Peak
Egypt and the Sudan, 1898
South Africa, 1899
Churchill’s Escape Route, 1899
Europe, 1914
The Western Front, August 25 to September 1, 1914
The Turkish Theater, 1915
Naval Attack on the Dardanelles, March 18, 1915
The Western Front, Late 1915
The Western Front, June 1916
The Western Front, July 1917
The Western Front, 1918
Europe, November 11, 1918
Anti-Bolshevik-Occupied Territories, 1919 and 1920
The Palestine Mandate
Ireland after Partition
The Indian Empire, 1929
Europe, 1931
CHRONOLOGY
1874 WSC born November 30 at Blenheim
1886 His father becomes chancellor of the Exchequer
His mother is now a great Victorian courtesan
1888 WSC enters Harrow; gets lowest marks in school
1893 Admitted to Sandhurst on third try
1894 Commissioned cavalry subaltern, Fourth Hussars
1895 His father dies
WSC covers the guerrilla warfare in Cuba
1896 Educates himself in India; discovers Macaulay and Gibbon
Writes first book
1897 Sees heavy fighting in Khyber Pass
1898 Omdurman: WSC in the last cavalry charge
1899 WSC runs for Parliament; loses
Captured in the Boer War
His sensational escape
1900 Recommended for VC
Elected to Parliament
Tours United States, Canada
1901 Queen Victoria dies
WSC’s maiden speech
1904 Quits Tories for Liberals
1905 Becomes colonial under secretary
1907 Tours East Africa
1908 Promoted to cabinet
Marries Clementine Hozier
His alliance with Lloyd George
They declare war on House of Lords
1910 WSC becomes home secretary
His welfare-state programs
1911 Battle of Sidney Street
WSC becomes first lord of the Admiralty
Father of the tank
1912–14 Irish Home Rule crisis
1913 WSC learns to fly, founds Royal Naval Flying Corps
1914 Outbreak of the Great War
WSC commands defense of Antwerp
1915 The Dardanelles tragedy
WSC dismissed from the Admiralty
Learns to paint
Commissioned and sent to the front
1916 As a lieutenant colonel, leads a battalion in trenches
1917 Cleared by the Dardanelles Commission
Rejoins cabinet
His tanks in action on the western front
1918 WSC in the trenches again
Germany surrenders
1919 WSC becomes secretary for war and air
Chief supporter of Russian anti-Bolsheviks
1920 Black and Tans in Ireland
1921 WSC becomes colonial secretary
Lawrence of Arabia his adviser
Founds Jordan, Iraq
Supports Jewish homeland
The Chanak crisis
WSC founds Irish Free State
Death of Marigold Churchill
1922 WSC buys Chartwell
1922–24 Loses three elections
Turns Tory, wins
Becomes chancellor of the Exchequer
1924 Warns of danger in Germany
1925 Returns Britain to the gold standard
1926 General strike
WSC publishes British Gazette
1929 Tours United States
Loses fortun
e in Wall Street
1931 Quits Tory leadership over India
Manhattan auto accident
WSC sounds alarm over Nazis
1932 Enters the political wilderness
PREAMBLE
THE LION AT BAY
THE French had collapsed. The Dutch had been overwhelmed. The Belgians had surrendered. The British army, trapped, fought free and fell back toward the Channel ports, converging on a fishing town whose name was then spelled Dunkerque.
Behind them lay the sea.
It was England’s greatest crisis since the Norman conquest, vaster than those precipitated by Philip II’s Spanish Armada, Louis XIV’s triumphant armies, or Napoleon’s invasion barges massed at Boulogne. This time Britain stood alone. If the Germans crossed the Channel and established uncontested beachheads, all would be lost, for it is a peculiarity of England’s island that its southern weald is indefensible against disciplined troops. In A.D. 61, Queen Boudicca of the Iceni rallied the tribes of East Anglia and routed the Romans at Colchester, Saint Albans, and London (then Londinium), cutting the Ninth Legion to pieces and killing seventy thousand. But because the nature of the southern terrain was unsuitable for the construction of strongpoints, new legions under Paulinus, arriving from Gaul, crushed the revolt, leaving the grief-stricken queen to die by her own hand.
Now the 220,000 Tommies at Dunkirk, Britain’s only hope, seemed doomed. On the Flanders beaches they stood around in angular, existential attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls awaiting disposition. There appeared to be no way to bring more than a handful of them home. The Royal Navy’s vessels were inadequate. King George VI has been told that they would be lucky to save 17,000. The House of Commons was warned to prepare for “hard and heavy tidings.”1 Then, from the streams and estuaries of Kent and Dover, a strange fleet appeared: trawlers and tugs, scows and fishing sloops, lifeboats and pleasure craft, smacks and coasters; the island ferry Gracie Fields; Tom Sopwith’s America’s Cup challenger Endeavour; even the London fire brigade’s fire-float Massey Shaw—all of them manned by civilian volunteers: English fathers, sailing to rescue England’s exhausted, bleeding sons.
Even today what followed seems miraculous. Not only were Britain’s soldiers delivered; so were French support troops: a total of 338,682 men. But wars are not won by fleeing from the enemy. And British morale was still unequal to the imminent challenge. These were the same people who, less than a year earlier, had rejoiced in the fake peace bought by the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Most of their leaders and most of the press remained craven. It had been over a thousand years since Alfred the Great had made himself and his countrymen one and sent them into battle transformed. Now in this new exigency, confronted by the mightiest conqueror Europe had ever known, England looked for another Alfred, a figure cast in a mold which, by the time of the Dunkirk deliverance, seemed to have been forever lost.
England’s new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England’s decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. They viewed Adolf Hitler as the product of complex social and historical forces. Their successor would have to be a passionate Manichaean who saw the world as a medieval struggle to the death between the powers of good and the powers of evil, who held that individuals are responsible for their actions and that the German dictator was therefore wicked. A believer in martial glory was required, one who saw splendor in the ancient parades of victorious legions through Persepolis and could rally the nation to brave the coming German fury. An embodiment of fading Victorian standards was wanted: a tribune for honor, loyalty, duty, and the supreme virtue of action; one who would never compromise with iniquity, who could create a sublime mood and thus give men heroic visions of what they were and might become. Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue in the original sense of the word, a believer in the supremacy of his race and his national destiny, an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people—a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great hunks of bleeding meat, persuading them that the year of Dunkirk would be one in which it was “equally good to live or to die”—who could if necessary be just as cruel, just as cunning, and just as ruthless as Hitler but who could win victories without enslaving populations, or preaching supernaturalism, or foisting off myths of his infallibility, or destroying, or even warping, the libertarian institutions he had sworn to preserve. Such a man, if he existed, would be England’s last chance.2
In London there was such a man.
Now at last, at last, his hour had struck. He had been waiting in Parliament for forty years, had grown bald and gray in his nation’s service, had endured slander and calumny only to be summoned when the situation seemed hopeless to everyone except him. His youngest daughter, seventeen-year-old “Mary the Mouse”—her family nickname—had been sunning herself at Chartwell, their country home in Kent, during the first hours of the German breakthrough, when the music on her portable radio had been interrupted by a BBC bulletin: “His Majesty the King has sent for Mr. Winston Churchill and asked him to form a government.” Mary, who adored her father, prayed for him and assumed that he would save England. So, of course, did he. But among those who fully grasped the country’s plight, that was a minority view. The Conservative party leadership, the men of Munich, still controlled the government—Lord Halifax, Sir Horace Wilson, Sir Kingsley Wood, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, and, of course, Churchill’s predecessor as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who detested him and everything he represented. Even George VI hadn’t wanted Chamberlain to quit No. 10 Downing Street; he thought his treatment had been “grossly unfair.” The King suggested Halifax as his successor. Labour’s erratic Stafford Cripps had already come out for Halifax. That suited the Tory hierarchy, but only a coalition could govern the nation, and the National Executive of the Labour party, meeting in a basement room of the Highcliff Hotel in Bournemouth, sent word that they would serve under no Conservative except Churchill. So Chamberlain persuaded the reluctant King to choose the man neither wanted.3
Not that it seemed to matter much. Churchill had said that “the Germans are always either at your throat or at your feet,” and as a hot May melted into a hotter June it appeared that their stranglehold was now unbreakable. Hitler was master of Europe. No one, not even Caesar, had stood so securely upon so glittering a pinnacle. The Führer told Göring: “The war is finished. I’ll come to an understanding with England.” On May 28, the first day of the Dunkirk evacuation, Halifax, speaking for the Conservative leadership, had told Churchill that a negotiated peace was England’s only alternative. Now, as the new prime minister’s foreign secretary and a member of his War Cabinet, the Yorkshire nobleman was quoted by the United Press as inviting “Chancellor Hitler to make a new and more generous peace offer.” It was, he said, the only reasonable course, the only decision a stable man of sound judgment could reach.4
He was quite right. But Winston Churchill was not a reasonable man. He was about as sound as the Maid of Orleans, a comparison he himself once made—“It’s when I’m Joan of Arc that I get excited.” Even more was he an Elijah, an Isaiah; a prophet. Deep insight, not stability, was his forte. To the War Cabinet he said, “I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with that man,” and concluded: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” He spoke to them, to the House, and then to the English people as no one had before or ever would again. He said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Another politician might have told them: “Our policy is to continue the struggle; all our forces and resources will be mobilized.” This is what Churchill said:
 
; Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
“Behind us,” he said, “… gather a group of shattered states and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Belgians, the Dutch—upon all of whom a long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must, as conquer we shall.” That was the language of the Elizabethans, and of a particular Elizabethan, the greatest poet in history: “This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.”5
Now, fired by the conviction which could only belong to one who had faced down inner despair, Churchill defied the “celestial grins” of Britain’s enemies, said peace feelers would “be viewed with the greatest disfavor by me,” and said he contemplated the future “with stern and tranquil gaze.” Free Englishmen, he told his people, would be more than a match for the “deadly, drilled, docile, brutish mass of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.” But he warned his family to prepare for invaders. His son’s bride Pamela protested: “But Papa, what can I do?” He growled: “You can always get a carving knife from the kitchen and take one with you, can’t you?” To the demoralized French he declared: “Whatever you may do, we shall fight on forever and ever and ever.” General Maxime Weygand replied by asking what would happen if a hundred Nazi divisions landed at Dover. Churchill told him: “Nous les frapperons sur la tête”—they would be hit on the head as they crawled ashore. Visiting Harrow, he heard the boys sing an old school song rewritten in his honor:
Not less we praise in darker days
The Leader of our Nation,
And Churchill’s name shall win acclaim