Churchill believed himself chosen by destiny. When he became Prime Minister in 1940, he reflected on how the circumstances of his birth, his abilities, and the quirks of his political fortunes had uniquely fitted him to fill his great station: “I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. 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.” Churchill felt that his American mother—a descendant of a lieutenant in George Washington’s army—gave him a special understanding of the “great Republic,” and he wrote of the Anglo-American alliance, “It certainly was odd that it should all work out this way; and once again I had the feeling . . . of being used, however unworthy, in some appointed plan.”
As Churchill himself noticed, even seemingly chance events played their role. He reflected on the 1896 accident that dislocated his shoulder and prevented him from using a sword; the injury bothered him until he died but perhaps also saved his life.
You never can tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck. Perhaps if in the charge of Omdurman I had been able to use a sword, instead of having to adopt a modern weapon like a Mauser pistol, my story might not have got so far as the telling. One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.
In the same disguise, Churchill’s banishment to the political wilderness during the 1930s was lucky. He’d warned of the dangers; he’d been ignored and scorned; in 1940, he bore no responsibility. As Churchill explained later, “I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it”—or, as he put it more poetically, “Over me beat the invisible wings.”
These invisible wings did more than preserve him from death or political extinction. They covered him with unexpected favors: the rare chance in South Africa to make himself a hero, where by pure luck during his prison escape, he knocked at the one British door for twenty miles; the perfectly timed inheritance from a distant relative that provided the money to buy Chartwell; the 1938 bailout from the rich admirer that allowed him to be a candidate for Prime Minister in 1940.
It was under the invisible wings that Churchill was chosen to be wartime Prime Minister. It happened in the afternoon of May 9, 1940, at a meeting at 10 Downing Street to choose Chamberlain’s successor, if he couldn’t continue as Prime Minister. Chamberlain faced the two contenders: Halifax and Churchill. They didn’t know it, of course, but within hours Hitler would unleash a brutal attack in western Europe.
By the end of the meeting, the choice was made. This decision—Churchill as Prime Minister—blazes from the mass of facts, and yet most accounts of May 1940 accept, with surprising docility, the certainty of this outcome. But it was hardly inevitable.
If Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax had pushed for the job, there is little doubt he would have got it. In Churchill’s favor was the fact that his support was growing in the House. But resigning Prime Minister Chamberlain, and the bulk of the Conservative Party he led, wanted Halifax. The King wanted Halifax. The Labour leadership would have accepted Halifax. True, the fact that Halifax was a peer presented a hurdle, but that could have been solved. Nevertheless, Halifax bowed out.
Why did Halifax defer to Churchill? Those in high office seek higher office, and Halifax—a haughty man of terrific ambition—was no exception. It wasn’t that he wanted to leave government: he remained in the Cabinet as an outspoken Foreign Secretary. It wasn’t that he didn’t have an opinion about the proper course for Britain: he persistently argued that Britain must consider a negotiated peace. Did he shrink from bearing so much responsibility? Unlikely, given a career that included several high posts; in the one he’d most enjoyed, Viceroy of India, he’d decided the fates of more than 300 million. Did he lack the stomach to be Prime Minister with a restive Churchill under him, speechifying and criticizing at every turn? Perhaps. Perhaps he believed he’d be better able to restrain Churchill’s wilder ideas if he remained Foreign Secretary, or perhaps he predicted, as many did, that Churchill’s government would soon fail and that he could then replace Churchill with that powerful adversary removed. Or perhaps he truly believed that Churchill, not he, had the qualities needed to lead the country. Whatever his reason, Halifax did refuse the highest political prize when it was within his grasp.
It was Halifax’s habit, when offered high office, to demur until his superiors pleaded that his service was indispensable. If Chamberlain had insisted that it was Halifax’s patriotic duty to assume the Premiership at this critical hour, Halifax perhaps would have done so, whatever his hesitations. (Halifax certainly performed his greatest service by declining the office. This was a man who on May 10, 1940—having learned upon waking that, at dawn, Hitler had attacked Belgium and Holland on a path to France, at a time when the British leadership was in crisis—nevertheless left the Foreign Office to keep his dentist’s appointment.)
If Halifax might have accepted the position had Chamberlain insisted, the question becomes, why didn’t Chamberlain press Halifax harder? He said he preferred Halifax, and it would have been only natural for him to feel that way. Halifax had loyally supported him while Churchill had opposed him. And yet instead of continuing to push Halifax, Chamberlain turned to Churchill. Why?
Chamberlain prided himself that he was realistic, businesslike, with a passionate dedication to peace. He had all these qualities—and these identical defects. With his narrow, prosaic mind, and in his vanity, Chamberlain simply couldn’t comprehend Hitler. Even as of September 30, 1940, he complained in a letter to the King that his failed attempts to avoid war “might well have succeeded if they had not come up against the insatiate and inhuman ambitions of a fanatic.” Wasn’t that the point of all who criticized Chamberlain’s policy? That he’d persisted in his appeasement with utter disregard for Hitler’s obvious nature? Perhaps, at long last, Chamberlain grasped that his virtues (which were also Halifax’s) were out of season and that it was Churchill who possessed the necessary qualities of imagination and stomach for war. And of course, it was Churchill who embodied—for the British people and for the Germans as well—a policy of absolute resistance to Hitler.
Churchill trusted that destiny would guide and protect him. “Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence seem to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man’s own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power.” And yet . . . Churchill’s good fortune was also bad fortune. He would win a great victory, and fulfill his destiny, but not as he expected—and not as he wanted.
29
CHURCHILL THE IMPERIALIST
His Cause
Most people live personal, domestic lives; few devote themselves to a great cause. Early in his life, Churchill settled on his purpose, and he never wavered from it: “I want to see the British Empire preserved . . . in its strength and splendor.” Most of what he did—both good and bad—sprang from his desire to maintain the Empire. Sometimes, he was praised for what he did in the Empire’s name, and at other times, abused.
For the first several decades of his life, just as Churchill’s position in the world expanded, so did the British Empire’s. In 1900, Churchill was a newly elected MP, and the Empire was the largest the world had ever seen; after World War I, Churchill was one of the Empire’s leaders as it stretched to its widest palmy reach. Churchill’s purpose—what he fought for his whole life—was its advancement.
Born into the ruling elite, Churchill never doubted his fitness to command, and he expected every class and race to accept its lot cheerfully. “I was brought up in that state of civilization,” he explained, “when it was everywhere accepted that men are born unequal.”
At home in England, Churchill wanted to improve the lives of the poor and unfortunate—but from a
lordly instinct of benevolence, not from a belief that his fellow Britons were entitled to certain rights and protections. He wanted to improve the old order, not create a new one. He reacted harshly to demands, to threats, to strikes (whether by suffragettes, miners, nationalists, or unions); he gave out of condescending generosity, not out of obligation, to his good, loyal people.
These same beliefs, on a larger scale, shaped Churchill’s attitudes toward colonial subjects. He never doubted that the British, with their genius for government, should shoulder the burden of governing their inferiors in foreign parts. He was untroubled by the Empire’s double nature: for whites, democratic and free; for nonwhites, authoritarian and military. He took an unabashedly racial view of the matter: the superior white had a duty and a right to rule. In 1922, he wrote the Governor of Bengal’s wife:
I am sure . . . you will do your best to keep the Flag flying and the prestige and authority of the white man undiminished. Our true duty in India lies to those 300 millions whose lives and means of existence would be squandered if entrusted to the chatterboxes who are supposed to speak for India today.
Even during the Second World War, while Indian soldiers fought to defend Britain, Churchill carefully distinguished between races. He wrote the Secretary of State for War to protest the fact that two British brigades went by the name of the “36th Indian Division”—a circumstance which he considered to go “below the level of grovelling to which we have been subject.” In 1943, he asked, “Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority? We are superior.” Later, he explained, “When you learn to think of a race as inferior beings it is difficult to get rid of that way of thinking; when I was a subaltern the Indian did not seem to me equal to the white man.”
Churchill believed that the purpose of the overseas Empire was to support England’s world stature, and in his imperial vision, India shone brightest. For generations, a tiny number of Britons (at peak, about 150,000) had controlled more than 300 million inhabitants of India, on a subcontinent larger than Europe. Churchill didn’t want to see this arrangement changed, and he isolated himself in the 1930s by opposing even modest steps toward Indian self-government. Churchill argued that Britain had brought India a civilization “far above anything they could possibly have achieved themselves or could maintain” and prophesied that the “false benevolence” of granting independence to India would result in chaos, blood, and famine as well as the undermining of Britain’s world-power status. He condemned those who supported self-rule. “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi,” scoffed Churchill in a 1931 speech, “now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-Regal Palace. . . . Such a spectacle can only increase the unrest in India and the danger to which white people there are exposed.” (Who was the Viceroy who was willing to meet with Gandhi? Lord Halifax, in an earlier incarnation.)
Another major effort by Churchill on the Empire’s behalf was his wartime cultivation of Roosevelt, whose aid was crucial to British victory. Churchill—who never stopped talking, who never listened to anyone else, who excelled at biting criticism—managed to hold his tongue, except to praise and wheedle. “No lover,” Churchill said, “ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” By careful correspondence, several face-to-face meetings (Churchill did most of the traveling), characteristic eloquence, and uncharacteristic tact, Churchill worked to build American support for Britain. He didn’t enjoy playing the role of supplicant, but he did what he had to do. In July 1940, as Nazis stormed across Europe, opposed only by Britain, Churchill begged Roosevelt to send destroyers—with dignity, of course, but still he begged: “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.” He left many harsh things unsaid—letters rewritten, speeches softened. He did it for the Empire.
Given Churchill’s intense pride in the British Empire, it’s surprising to learn his hopes for the postwar relationship of Britain and the United States: he repeatedly, and approvingly, predicted that they’d unite—he anticipated common citizenship and the “dollar sterling.” His well-publicized friendship with Roosevelt was meant to symbolize the deep affinity of their two countries. In his famous “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946, Churchill joined the two countries together in rhetoric:
The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. . . . Opportunity is here now, clear and shining for both our countries. . . . It is necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of purpose and the grand simplicity of decision shall guide and rule the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they did in war.
But why would Churchill, who fought so fiercely to preserve the British Empire, welcome the prospect of melding with the United States?
The answer might also explain why, when the time came, contrary to expectations, he made no real effort as Opposition party leader after 1945 to defeat the Attlee government’s policy in favor of Indian independence.
He hoped to build another Empire, a stronger one. He foresaw that the existing Empire, based on India, was doomed. Once India left, the rest of the Empire would collapse as well. But just as the Indian Empire had once replaced the American Empire, now the United States could replace India. And what a partner! The United States was at the pinnacle of world power. In his August 16, 1945, address to the House of Commons, in a discussion of the use of the atomic bomb, Churchill addressed this preeminence:
The United States stand at this moment at the summit of the world. I rejoice that this should be so. Let them act up to the level of their power and their responsibility, not for themselves but for others, for all men in all lands, and then a brighter day may dawn upon human history.
And for all his deference to the United States, in Churchill’s view, Britain remained the senior partner of the two. After all, Churchill emphasized, America owed its best traditions to Britain—their shared language and the values of democracy, personal liberty, and the rule of law. He pointedly wrote, “The [United States’s] Constitution was a reaffirmation of faith in the principles painfully evolved over the centuries by the English-speaking peoples. It enshrined long-standing English ideas of justice and liberty, henceforth to be regarded on the other side of the Atlantic as basically American.”
The problem with this plan was that the United States didn’t want to play that role and didn’t see the future as Churchill saw it. As the years wore on, Churchill realized that, try as he might, he wouldn’t live to see a great reunion.
India was lost and, after India, the rest of the Empire, and the United States wasn’t to be gained. Churchill had dreaded this dwindling of British stature. He’d thundered in 1942, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” It was one of his life’s ironies that, in fact, this was precisely his fate. “We shall defend our Island,” he’d pledged in 1940, “whatever the cost may be.” The defense of the Island cost the Empire. Churchill’s reverence for the Empire blinded him to its weak and overtaxed structure, and he didn’t appreciate that the added strains of war would cripple it. And not only did Britain lack the resources to rule its Empire after the war—it had lost the desire to paint the map red. When peace came, the British wanted to come home, settle down, rebuild. The principle of self-rule had taken root in the world, and Britain accepted it, too. “It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire,” Churchill said in 1947. “Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.”
By the end of his life, Churchill had seen both the Empire’s greatest expansion and its contraction into a damp island of some 45 million people. Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan observed of him in a 1950 letter, “Of course he was depressed—says everything he has worked for all his life (the Brit. Emp.) has been thrown away by the socialists in power—he accused the U.S. of having been instrumental in breaking up our Co
lonial Empire.” Years later, he told her, “In the end it has all been for nothing. . . . The Empire I believed in has gone.”
But it wasn’t until Churchill died in 1965 that the sun finally set on the Empire. His mere presence in the world, with his massive prestige and position, upheld the banner of Britain’s former glory. His funeral marked its descent. The next most memorable occasion of British pageantry was the marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Churchill’s distant cousin, Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. The world thrilled at the royal splendor: the glass coach bearing the bride to Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the throngs of people cheering in the streets, Diana murmuring, “I, Diana Frances, take thee, Philip Charles Arthur George” (in the wrong order—his first name is Charles). But how different everything was. The Empire had been swept away. The royal pomp had become a tourist attraction, and though splendid, the ceremony seemed overdone, performed by such a diminished nation.
30
CHURCHILL’S EMPIRE
How He Saw the World
Understanding where the biography’s subject lived is as important as understanding when. Churchill considered himself to live in England, but more important, in the capital of the British Empire. It’s easy, given the Britain of today, to forget the immensity of the Empire at its height, when London directed the government of more than one-quarter of the world’s land and population. Churchill was alive when the Empire’s reach was greatest, and its supreme position matched the enormity of his own ambitions. He never resigned himself to its diminishment.