Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill

by Gretchen Rubin

  Although Churchill claimed that he shared only one thing with Hitler—“a horror of whistling”—they shared many of the qualities that buttress a leader’s power. Each had charisma, confidence, eloquence, physical stamina, and a high tolerance for risk. Each was ruthless, driven, obsessed with military power, fascinated by science, self-educated, self-absorbed, with a strong historical imagination. They’d both proved themselves in battle, and both had a surprising passion for painting. They both sought to control every aspect of the war, from grand strategy to minor details (Churchill worrying about soldiers’ beer ration, Hitler considering what music should be used as radio fanfares to announce German victories).

  Each leader had a deep faith in his destiny and in the destiny of his race. From his youth, Churchill believed himself fated to play a vital role in preserving the Empire and its traditions. He saw himself as a bulwark, the savior of something ancient and precious, the leader of a people who would once again triumph in defense of freedom. Hitler saw himself as a purifier and sole creator of something new. With the thousand-year Reich—which lasted twelve years, three months, and ten days—he wanted to destroy and transform, not preserve. Hitler’s belief in his destiny was so profound that the near success of a 1944 assassination attempt actually comforted him; he believed his escape proved, once again, that Providence assured him victory. And after all, it’s true that at the Reich’s height, by diplomacy and war, Hitler—son of a minor official in rural Austria, a once-aimless drifter with little education—had achieved triumphs worthy of comparison to Napoleon.

  But far more significant than similarities were differences—how Churchill and Hitler each used his capacity for leadership. Churchill, for all his fascination with modern technology and desire to shape the future, stood as the embodiment of time-honored standards and customs. Hitler instead wanted to force the future of Germany and the world. He was the product of past wrongs and grievances, and he ushered in a new order: modern, frighteningly efficient, employing “science” for mass destruction, systematic breeding, and racial purification. The Nazi swastika, the black eagle, the rallies lit by searchlight, were meant to whip individuals into an obedient, frenzied mass. There were no enduring principles to which Hitler adhered, no code to constrain his actions. He boasted:

  I am willing to sign anything. . . . I am prepared to guarantee all frontiers and to make non-aggression pacts and friendly alliances with anybody. . . . Why should I not make an agreement in good faith today and unhesitatingly break it tomorrow if the future of the German people demands it?

  (Hitler’s candor could give pause to revisionists who argue that Churchill should have found a way to secure peace with Hitler in 1940.)

  Although both rallied their nations, it was Hitler who held his people in the tighter grip. Biographer Ian Kershaw noted that “few, if any, twentieth-century political leaders have enjoyed greater popularity among their own people than Hitler in the decade or so following his assumption of power on 30 January 1933.” Churchill inspired respect and affection, but Hitler’s effect was of a different magnitude. His relentless campaigning had given him a deep knowledge of the German people, and he divined the longings and resentments that festered below the surface of ordinary, respectable lives. Hitler had a profound grasp of the desires and weaknesses of others—other people and other nations—and he brilliantly exploited them. He saw, for example, how much Neville Chamberlain wanted peace, and he unhesitatingly played to that ambition.

  One of the most characteristic differences between Churchill and Hitler was their attitude toward war and its consequences. Many considered Churchill a warmonger, but he wanted war to secure peace. In 1943, watching a film about the bombing of Germany—a policy he supported—he exclaimed, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” He was fueled by the desire not to destroy but to preserve. “I hate nobody except Hitler—and that is professional.” On February 1, 1945, at the end of the bitter war, he wrote Clementine:

  I am free to confess to you that my heart is saddened by the tales of the masses of German women and children flying along the roads everywhere in 40-mile long columns to the West before the advancing Armies. I am clearly convinced that they deserve it; but that does not remove it from one’s gaze. The misery of the whole world appals me. . . .

  Hitler never hesitated in his destruction. In 1939, he admonished, “Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right.” When he learned his personal bodyguard division had suffered heavy casualties, he cried, “Losses can never be too high! They sow the seeds of future greatness.” Hitler deliberately harnessed the very worst in his people and encouraged the methodical expression of their most depraved impulses of extermination, torture, humiliation, and plunder.

  A leader must have an instinctual grasp of the people. Some have argued that Churchill couldn’t understand the struggles of ordinary Britons: he was a Duke’s grandson and lived a life of valets and silver candlesticks and country houses. But while Churchill never waited in line for a bus, his imagination and his secure place in the world gave him sympathy for those whose troubles he didn’t share. He visited the front when he could, toured bombed areas, and worried about the public’s comforts and conveniences: he wrote countless memos about shortening the bus-stop lines, improving egg production, or making sure the troops got their medals. He insisted on the dignity of the common people and, for example, wrote General Ismay to insist that the term “Reserve Brigades” be used instead of “low-grade infantry brigades.”

  Churchill’s faith in the British never flagged, and, confident of their courage, he never disguised the peril the country faced. On June 18, 1940, after France surrendered, Churchill addressed the House of Commons:

  The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. . . . [I]f we fail, then the whole world, including the United States . . . 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.”

  When someone told him that the best thing he’d done had been to give the people courage, he contradicted, “I never gave them courage; I was able to focus theirs.”

  Hitler was fueled by resentment and insecurity, both for himself and for Germany. Unlike Churchill, who thought nothing of being seen in his underwear or wrapped in a towel, Hitler had a morbid fear of looking ridiculous and even refused to be photographed wearing glasses. Although he claimed to act for Germany’s benefit, at bottom, Hitler held the German people in contempt. Despite his advisers’ pleas, Hitler almost never visited bombed cities or the front. When aides tried to show him pictures of the plight of German refugees, he pushed the photographs aside, saying at one point, “We can no longer afford to concern ourselves with the population.” During the war’s final years, Hitler refused to exploit his oratorical gifts to invigorate Germany. Goebbels urged Hitler to address the war-weary public. “A talk by the Fuhrer over the radio would be as good as a victorious battle today,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on March 26, 1945. “In the hour of Britain’s war crisis Churchill addressed himself to the nation in a magnificent speech and put it on its feet again. . . . Now that we are in a similar, though not much worse situation, we must do the same.” Hitler knew his powers; why did he refuse to speak? Alan Bullock speculated, “Hitler’s gifts as an orator had always depended on his flair for sensing what was in the minds of his audience. He no longer wanted to know what was in the minds of the German people; at all costs he must preserve his illusions.” Hitler knew he wouldn’t survive defeat, and he wanted Germany to perish with him. “If the war is to be lost, the nation also will perish. . . . There is no need to consider the basis even of
a most primitive existence any longer. On the contrary it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves. The nation has proved itself weak, and the future belongs to the stronger Eastern nation.”

  Historians battle over whether Hitler was a predictable outgrowth of German history or whether he was a monster utterly outside the ordinary. Hitler was both. He was the harvest of the fears, resentments, and yearnings of German history—but that doesn’t mean that he was inevitable. And so with Churchill. The British experience simultaneously produced the fighter Churchill and the appeaser Chamberlain, whose policy also had logic, strategy, and good intentions behind it.

  It was to Hitler that Churchill owed his enduring stature. Hitler didn’t need Churchill, but Churchill wouldn’t have been Churchill without Hitler. Churchill wrote many fine books, held many prominent offices, fought many battles both military and civilian. But it was his deep insight into Hitler and the Nazi regime, and his triumph in meeting that challenge, that immortalized Churchill. It’s one of the ironies of history that the “wicked man” rescued Churchill from political exile and gave him the opportunity to rise to his great level. Hitler himself pointed this out: “But had this war not come, who would speak of Churchill?”

  In May 1940, Churchill and Hitler faced off to the last. Alike and unalike, their opposition sums up that terrible age. Appropriately, for archetypes, both men lived in atmospheres suffused with symbols, portents, divine intervention. Consider just one historical echo: in ancient times, according to the Greek Herodotus, when King Croesus consulted the Delphic oracle about whether he should invade Persia, the oracle foretold that “if Croesus attacked the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire.” Croesus attacked and lost; he returned to ask the oracle why it had answered falsely. The priestess explained, “After an answer like that, the wise thing would have been to send again to inquire which empire was meant.” A nice twist; surely, the reader supposes, a clever invention of the priests or Herodotus. But then read Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on July 19, 1940, in which he predicts accurately:

  It almost causes me pain to think that I should have been selected by Fate to deal the final blow to the structure which these men [Churchill and his colleagues] have already set tottering. . . . I shall speak a great prophecy. A great Empire will be destroyed, an Empire which it was never my intention to destroy.

  One modern theory holds that historical change is the result of material conditions and institutions, not the actions and ideas of outstanding individuals. Churchill and Hitler prove instead that a single person can change the course of history. Both were saved from death many times; the memory of these uncanny near misses—the bombs that exploded without reaching their targets, the bullets that didn’t hit, the nearly fatal accidents and illnesses—provokes awe, with the thought of how different it might have been. Yet it also seems that history could not have been other than it was, with all its forces embodied in these two figures.

  Hitler gives the Nazi salute.

  Hitler gives the Nazi salute.

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  Churchill flashes the V sign.

  Churchill flashes the V sign.

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  34

  CHURCHILL EXPOSED

  Missing Information Supplied

  No biography can be complete or conclusive. The shelves groan with Churchill biographies, but what’s the answer to the simple question, what was his birth weight? (Relevant to whether Churchill was premature when he was born, seven months after his parents married.) Even the longest account omits most facts about a subject’s life, so it’s the few chosen facts that give a portrait its shape.

  Layers of fact pile higher and higher, and each additional fact may change the picture of the subject. A biographer’s choice to highlight or dismiss certain episodes—controversial, offensive, or poignant—can vividly color a portrait. Readers unfamiliar with the subject’s life are blind to the artful selection that’s taking place.

  This account of Churchill—like many, though not all—will conclude that Churchill was one of the greatest heroes of his time. But unlike a fictional hero who obediently performs an assigned role, Churchill muddied his identity with contradictions and shortcomings. Consider some unfortunate facts that, up to this point, have been passed over.

  To shield his reputation, this account has downplayed Churchill’s deplorable attitudes toward race. Churchill used opprobrious terms like blackamoor, chink, wop, and baboo and distinguished between the white race and others. For example, he wrote that at a September 1944 conference, he was “glad to record” that “the British Empire . . . was still keeping its position, with a total population, including the Dominions and Colonies, of only seventy million white people.” He never outgrew his views. His doctor recalled that in 1955, Churchill asked whether “blacks got measles. . . . When he was told that there was a very high mortality among negroes from measles he growled: ‘Well, there are plenty left. They’ve a high rate of production.’ ”

  Churchill’s disdain for women’s company—except for a few beauties and a few brilliant conversationalists—has also been glossed over. His cousin Anita Leslie recalled, “Winston regarded males as the people who mattered; the ones who made the world go round. This did not mean that he was incapable of deep love for women, but what could women actually do except please and inspire the male sex?” Early on, Churchill had opposed votes for women: female suffrage was “contrary to natural law and the practice of civilized states”; women were “adequately represented by their husbands.” Later, he supported, in theory, female suffrage. But militant suffragettes fired his opposition with their demands (he refused to be “henpecked on a question of such grave importance”), he thought there were already too many “ignorant voters,” and he feared disturbance of the political equilibrium, and so his support was not passionate or even consistent.

  As for the right to vote, contradicting his standing as democracy’s great defender, as late as the 1930s, Churchill wrote newspaper articles advocating abandoning the “complete democracy” of one adult, one vote and returning to the traditional system that favored “more responsible elements.” Wishing perhaps for the system that had been in place when he entered Parliament in 1900, when not even a third of Britons could vote, in 1930 he wrote with regret about earlier times when “we had a real political democracy led by a hierarchy of statesmen, and not a fluid mass distracted by newspapers . . . before the liquefaction of the British political system had set in.”

  This account has also ignored instances of brutality and vulgarity. For example, Churchill as Home Secretary advocated the forced sterilization of “mental degenerates” and, in a 1910 letter that reads as if drafted by a Nazi, argued, “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes . . . constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.” Years later, a young Labour MP drove to Chartwell to apologize to Churchill after insulting him on the floor of the House. The MP arrived and gave Churchill’s valet his name and purpose. Churchill was on the toilet; when his valet delivered the message, Churchill replied, “Tell him I’m on the privy and can take only one shit at a time.”

  Churchill never hesitated to use his wit to attack, and his cuts were all the harsher for being so memorable. In 1931, criticizing Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald during a debate in the House of Commons, Churchill related:

  I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as “The Boneless Wonder.” My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes. I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder—sitting on the Treasury Bench.

  When, returning from Munich in 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain waved the paper with Hitler’s signature, Churchill scoffed, “See that old town clerk looking at Eu
ropean affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.” He referred to U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as “Dull, Duller, Dulles.” Of Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s modesty, Churchill said, “But then, he has a great deal to be modest about.”

  Churchill is praised for his military innovations. What about all his bad ideas? Just months before the Munich Agreement, he criticized the Hurricane and Spitfire fighter planes, which would save England in 1940. He was initially convinced that armored ships were invincible against bombers, unless a bomb dropped down the ship’s funnel. He received £100,000 to develop an earth-cutting machine that came to nothing. He persisted in believing, contrary to experience, that resistance movements inside occupied countries could be highly effective. He ordered studies of gas and chemical warfare reprisals as well as a scheme for destroying, one by one, a hundred German towns.

  Does including this suppressed material make the picture of Churchill more or less true? Both.

  35

  CHURCHILL TRUE OR FALSE

  Challenged Assumptions

  Facts have an irresistible glamor and authority, but they’re slippery: the actual life of a public figure like Churchill becomes obscured by myth, by assumptions we make, and by facts we think we know. Pulling information out of context in a crude “True or False?” quiz highlights the difficulty of grasping the true facts of a life, even a life as familiar as Churchill’s.

  Circle “True” or “False.” See end of chapter for answers.