With British troops evacuated from Dunkirk and a German invasion of the homeland apparently inevitable, Churchill told the House of Commons: “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.” Two weeks later, as he announced the fall of France, he again addressed the House: “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.’”
He kept his nerve as the RAF defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, making a Nazi invasion impossible. In the Cabinet war rooms, Churchill directed the war with energy and imagination, whether traveling abroad to visit troops and foreign leaders or holding meetings from his bed in the morning and pushing his exhausted officials until 3 or 4 a.m., drinking large volumes of champagne and brandy as he worked. He worked hard to develop a good relationship with President Roosevelt, and he engaged positively with Stalin, despite his innate dislike of communism. At a series of summit conferences, he agreed with both leaders not only the strategy against Hitler but also the shape of the postwar world.
In the election held in July 1945 after the defeat of Germany, Churchill and the Conservatives lost power. The following year he described, presciently, the “Iron Curtain” now descending across a Cold War Europe. He returned as prime minister from 1951 to 1955. He turned down the offer of a dukedom but the “greatest living Englishman” remained an Edwardian romantic imperialist with an Augustan style and vision, although he never lost his impish wit. When his grandson once asked him if he was the greatest man in the world, he replied, “Yes! Now bugger off!” When accused of drinking too much, he responded, “I’ve taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” His writing was as fine as his leadership; he was the only political leader in history to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. On his death in January 1965, Churchill received a state funeral, an honor rarely accorded those outside the royal family.
IBN SAUD
1876–1953
His personal ambition is boundless, but is tempered by great discretion and caution. He is a relentless enemy while opposition lasts, but in the hour of victory is one of the most humane Arabs in history. As for his system of rule … he keeps his own counsel even among his relatives, and essentially his rule is absolute.
Eldon Rutter
Abdul Aziz al Saud—known to Westerners as Ibn Saud—was a self-made king, a shrewd statesman, masterful diplomatist, tribal politician, religious ascetic and an athletic desert warrior. Over six foot four inches tall, he was famous for his prowess in battlefield, on camel-back and in the bedroom and created the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia, still a medieval dynastic autocracy well into the 21st century. Saudi Arabia remains a key player in the Middle East yet there is a contradiction at its heart: this ally of America is an Islamic autocracy in which opposition is repressed, women have few rights and the country is ruled by a strictly puritanical and anti-Western form of Islam—Wahhabism—which the Saudis export along with their oil riches.
Ibn Saud’s achievement was not the first blossoming of his dynasty but the third. In the 18th century a puritanical Islamic preacher named Muhammad al-Wahhab had attacked the superstitions and shrines of traditional Islam in Arabia, demanding a return to the fundamentalist asceticism that he claimed was the original way of the Prophet. Wahab allied himself with a local sheikh around Riyadh in the Najd region of Arabia named Muhammad ibn Saud. They formed a political and religious alliance cemented by dynastic marriages between the families. Wahhabism proved a powerful force and Arabians flocked to join Saud’s armies. The Ottoman empire nominally ruled Arabia, with the sultan-caliph in Istanbul serving as guardian of the Holy Places, Mecca and Medina. But the Ottoman empire was in crisis, struggling to control its heartlands, let alone the remote provinces of Arabia. Taking advantage of this, Saud and Wahhab founded a Saudi state around 1744 that terrorized more moderate Muslims, destroyed their shrines, conquered much of Arabia, raided up into the Ottoman provinces of Iraq and ultimately conquered Mecca and Medina, where they imposed their new puritanism. The Ottoman sultan repeatedly sent armies to destroy the Saudis but in vain until, in the early 19th century, Istanbul asked the semi-independent Pasha of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, to restore order. In 1818, Mehmet Ali and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, completed the defeat of the Saudis, the Saudi sheikh was sent to be beheaded in Istanbul and the sultan was back in charge. A few years later, the Saudis reestablished a small state in the Najd but it was not until Ibn Saud that the family restored its fortunes fully. In the meantime, Arabia was dominated by the al Rashid family that drove out the Sauds while the Ottomans appointed the sherifs of Mecca from the traditional Hashemite family.
As a child, Ibn Saud had to escape by night from the family seat in Riyadh to avoid the triumphant Rashid family, living with his father in Kuwaiti exile. But young Ibn Saud was determined to changed the family fortunes: backed by his elder ally Muburak al Sabah and the Sabahs, the ruling family of Kuwait, he pulled off a remarkable coup with a tiny army of Bedouins and tribesman when he seized Riyadh in 1902.
It was the beginning of a remarkable career of military adventure and diplomatic intrigue. Ibn Saud won victories against the Rashid and other rivals but the battles were small, the armies scarcely larger than a thousand fighters at a time. But the young prince was able to resuscitate and harness the vigorous fanaticism of the Wahhabis whom he mobilized into a new military-religious legion—the Ikhwan or the Brothers—who became the heart of his desert army. He built up a relationship with the British, and when the Ottomans and British started to bid for his favor during the First World War, Saud played them off against one another. But he was less aggressive in his promises than Sherif Hussain, the Hashemite amir of Mecca, who offered the British an Arab revolt from Arabia to Syria against the Ottoman sultan. Hussain was Saud’s sworn enemy and the two increasingly vied for control of the whole of Arabia. Declaring himself king of the Arabs, Sherif Hussain, backed by his sons Abdullah and Faisal, launched their attack against the Ottomans, funded by vast British financial grants. But their actions never delivered a mass Arab revolt and scarcely defeated the Ottomans, even around Mecca.
Ibn Saud meanwhile waited out the war, and when the Ottoman empire collapsed in 1918, the Hashemites proved no match for him and his Ikhwan fighters. In a series of clashes, Hussain’s ambitious eldest son Prince Abdullah (the future king of Jordan) was defeated by the Saudi forces. Britain was alarmed at the collapse of its ally. Saud had his own problems: the Ikhwan were hard to control and started to raid into Iraq (controlled by Britain), where they especially loathed the Shiites whom they regarded as heretics. In response, the British army and RAF attacked the Ikhwan. Ultimately Ibn Saud managed to suppress the over-mighty leaders of the Ikhwan and then defeated King Hussain’s son King Ali of Hejaz, taking control of all of Arabia and Mecca and Medina in 1924 before finally overcoming the Ikhwan in battle, the last time he commanded in person. Ibn Saud declared himself king of Hejaz and in 1932 he became king of Saudi Arabia. (The Hashemites went on to amass precarious thrones outside Arabia: Faisal was first king of Syria, then Iraq where, his family ruled until 1958. Abdullah’s great-grandson Abdullah II became king of Jordan in 1999).
Ibn Saud had always prided himself on his prowess as a fighter and a lover: he was usually married to three wives, divorcing earlier ones as he married the new. It was said he kept a harem of seventy odalisques and he left around seventy children including forty sons.
The kingdom he created was an absolutist dynastic monarchy combined with a Wahhabi theocracy in which the Saudi king acted as a guarantor of religious purity. The discovery of oil empowered the kingdom, giving it vast wealth, a process that began in 1933. On his death in 1953, Ibn Saud was succeeded by his feckless, inept and inconsistent son Saud, who was deposed by the princes in 1958. He kept the title but handed over power to Faisal who succeeded a
s king on Saud’s death. Faisal was experienced and shrewd but was assassinated in 1975. The succession then went to Ibn Saud’s sons, King Khalid and then King Fahd. In 1979 fanatics seized the shrine of Mecca, challenging the corruption of the Saudis: as many as 1,000 were killed when Saudi forces stormed the complex and restored order. The real contradiction of Saudi rule was exposed by the 9/11 attack on America: the al-Qaeda terrorists were overwhelmingly Saudis, most notably their leader Osama bin Laden. Well into the 21st century Saudi Arabia was still ruled by Ibn Saud’s octogenarian sons but power is gradually passing to the next generation.
VILLA & ZAPATA
1878–1923 & 1819–1919
It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!
Emiliano Zapata
Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were Mexico’s two most celebrated and notorious revolutionary warlords: they were blood-thirsty brigands or murderous psychopaths to some, romantic heroes or radical reformers to others: both were gifted and charismatic but both were also brutal, cold-blooded and ambitious. Both died violently.
Born as Doroteo Arango, somewhere near San Juan del Río, Durango, in 1878, Pancho Villa hailed from peasant stock. After working as a sharecropper in his late childhood, he moved to the city of Chihuahua when he was sixteen, hoping to make his fortune, but when a landowner from his village sexually assaulted his sister, he returned home immediately and killed her assailant in cold blood. With that one act, he consigned himself to a life of banditry and fled for the Sierra Madre mountains. For the next seventeen years, he terrorized those living within or passing through his mountain fiefdom: cattle rustling, bank robbery and murder were his specialties.
Mexico at the time was ruled by the corrupt dictator Porfirio Díaz. Much of the country’s land was ruthlessly exploited by the wealthy owners of large estates (haciendas), leaving the bulk of the population to labor under political repression and grinding poverty. In 1910, the long-serving Díaz stood for “re-election” as president. Opposition to his rule, however, had crystallized around Francisco Madero, the “apostle of democracy,” supported by volunteers known as antirreeleccionista (antireelectionists). When Díaz inevitably claimed victory, Madero proclaimed his Plan of San Luis Potosi, declaring the election fraudulent and calling for an armed uprising. The Mexican Revolution had begun. Villa threw in his lot with the revolution, capturing the towns of both Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez for the Maderoists. Though he claimed a political “awakening,” it is hard to tell whether he believed in the cause or simply sensed which way the wind was blowing, but whatever one believes, the revolution proved to be a turning point in his life.
By 1911, Díaz had been swept from power and forced into exile. Hopes for the establishment of genuine democracy in Mexico, however, were dashed when, in 1913, President Madero was assassinated by loyalists to the old regime. Victoriano Huerta, the head of the Mexican armed forces, seized power in a bloody coup. Formerly allies in the Maderoist cause, Huerta and Villa were by now bitter enemies, Huerta having even conspired to have Villa sentenced to death for stealing and insubordination. Only Madero’s personal intervention had prevented that sentence from being carried out.
Villa unsurprisingly committed himself to support the forces of Venustiano Carranza—leader of the opposition to Huerta—and secured a string of military victories, defeating Huerta’s forces at Ciudad Juárez, Tierra Blanca, Chihuahua, Ojinaga, Torreón, Saltillo and Zacatecas. These successes played a major part in bringing about Huerta’s eventual downfall in July 1914, and made Villa a hero of the revolution. They came, however, at a cost. At Zacatecas, 7000 people were killed and 5000 wounded—many of them civilians. Villa seemed to revel in the killing and was reluctant to accept any authority other than his own.
By 1915, Villa—once the darling of the revolution—had become an erratic renegade. He declared open revolt against Carranza and aligned himself ever more closely with the extremist fringe of the revolution around Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the struggle against President Díaz. In Carranza’s chief general, Álvaro Obregón, though, Villa had met his military match. He was defeated in two battles at Celaya in 1915, Obregón’s more modern techniques and weapons of war proving decisive.
Villa withdrew to Chihuahua and there instituted a reign of fear, imposing his own brand of law and recruiting new members (however reluctant) for his bandit brigades. Faced with growing economic problems, he ruthlessly requisitioned funds from the once loyal people of the region—a move that served only to impoverish them further. He even issued his own money, anyone who refused to accept the currency being shot for “betraying the revolution.”
Hemmed in by government forces, and increasingly enraged by what he saw as American interference (President Woodrow Wilson had opted to back Carranza’s government as the most likely way of establishing stable government in Mexico), Villa turned his attentions to the United States. In January 1916, he attacked a train on the Mexico North Western Railway, near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, killing eighteen Americans. In March, Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, killing ten soldiers and eight civilians.
In response, President Wilson sent some 6000 troops into Mexico under General John “Black Jack” Pershing, but this punitive expedition to find Pancho Villa proved unsuccessful.
Though he had shared in many of the same struggles as Villa, Zapata would follow a different path to him after Diaz had been ousted. Madero’s regime proved too conservative for Zapata and he refused to disband the force of guerrillas he had first assembled to take on Díaz. Instead, in 1911 he proclaimed the Plan de Ayala and promised to carry forward the revolution. The plan called for radical land reform in Mexico to improve the lot of the ordinary peasant. Zapata wanted to break down the estates by returning the land to Mexico’s impoverished indigenous communities. The ethos of his program was summed up in its rallying cry, “Tierra y Libertad!” (Land and Freedom!), which came to define Zapata and his supporters.
After Madero had been deposed by General Huerta, Zapata took part in the struggle against the new dictatorship. When Huerta was in turn ousted, to be replaced by the constitutionalist Carranza, history repeated itself. Zapata again found himself in opposition to the government, and once more resolved that the agrarian revolution he desired could only be secured by armed struggle. Lands were burned and opponents murdered by the rampaging Zapatistas—now styling themselves the Liberation Army of the South.
Carranza placed a sizeable bounty placed on the revolutionary’s head and once Villa had been defeated, Zapata became increasingly isolated. In April 1919 he was assassinated. He remains an even more iconic figure than Villa in Mexico. Villa was on the run until 1920, when he finally negotiated a peace deal with Carranza’s successor, President Adolfo de la Huerta. For three years afterward he lived in semi-retirement on his estates in Chihuahua, before he was assassinated in 1923.
At his death, Villa was reputed to have told his assassins, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
STALIN
1878–1953
He sought to strike, not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.
Leon Trotsky, 1936
Stalin was the Soviet dictator who defeated Hitlerite Germany in the Second World War, expanded the Russian empire to its greatest extent, industrialized the USSR and made it a nuclear superpower. During a reign of terror lasting thirty years, this mass murderer was responsible for the annihilation of more than 25 million of his own innocent citizens, and confined 18 million to slave-labor camps.
Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili was born in Gori, a small town in Georgia in the Caucasus, the son of an alcoholic cobbler called Beso and his clever, forceful wife, Keke. Poor, unsure of his real paternity, with a pockmarked face, webbed feet and one shorter arm, young Soso (as he was known) grew up to be a highly intelligent, super-sensitive, emotionally stunted child possessed of both an inferiority complex and an overweening arrogance. His mother managed to win him a place at the semi
nary in Tiflis, where he studied for the priesthood, learned Russian, studied the classics and published romantic poetry. But after his conversion to Marxism, he became a fanatical and pitiless revolutionary and joined Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. He was a born conspirator who dominated his comrades, undermined and betrayed his rivals, murdered suspected police spies, always pushing toward the extremes. He was repeatedly arrested but repeatedly escaped, returning from exile in Siberia for the 1905 Revolution. He became the leading financier of the Bolsheviks through bank robberies and extortion.
After the crushing of the 1905 Revolution, Stalin created his own outfit of gangsters and hit men who killed police agents and raised cash for Lenin in a series of outrageous, bloody bank robberies, protection rackets, train heists and piratical hold-ups on the Black Sea and the Caspian. Stalin’s career as an outlaw culminated in the Tiflis bank robbery in June 1907, in which his gangsters killed fifty people and got away with 300,000 rubles. Stalin then moved his outfit to oil-rich Baku, always on the run, always spreading violence and fear.
At this time Stalin was married to Kato Svanidze, with whom he had a son, Yakov, but Kato died in 1907. Contemptuous of a settled existence, he enjoyed affairs with many women, became engaged to many of them, fathered illegitimate children—and abandoned all of them heartlessly. He married again in 1918, but failed to make his new wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, any happier than his other women. She committed suicide in 1932, leaving Stalin two legitimate children, Vasily and Svetlana.
He lived under many aliases—but in the end he called himself Stalin—man of steel. His violent escapades having drawn the attention of Lenin, Stalin was elected to the Party’s Central Committee. Lenin realized Stalin combined two vital political talents—he was practical and capable of organizing violence, but he could also edit, write and work on theory. “He’s exactly the type I need,” he said. Stalin was arrested for the last time in 1912 and exiled to the Arctic Circle, where he spent most of the First World War. When the tsar was unexpectedly overthrown in March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd, where he was later joined by Lenin. After his seizure of power in the October Revolution, Lenin recognized that the brilliant, showy Leon Trotsky and the morose, ruthless Stalin were his two most competent henchmen, and promoted them to his ruling executive committee, the Politburo. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Lenin maintained power by terror, deploying Stalin as a brutal troubleshooter. But Stalin proved to be unimpressive as a military leader compared with Trotsky, whom Stalin constantly tried to undermine.