Winston Churchill

File:Winston churchill.jpg

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (November 30, 1874 - January 24, 1965)

Born at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill was a descendant of the first famous member of the Churchill family: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (whose father was also a "Sir Winston Churchill"). Winston's father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and his mother was an American.

The first notable appearance of Winston Churchill was as a war-correspondent in the second Anglo-Boer war between Britain and self-proclaimed Afrikaaners in South Africa. He was captured in a Boer ambush of a British Army train convoy, but managed a high profile escape and eventually crossed the South African border to Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo in Mozambique).

Churchill used the status achieved to begin a political career which would last a total of sixty-one years, serving as an MP in the House of Commons from 1901 to 1922 and from 1924 to 1964. At first a member of the Conservative Party, he soon 'crossed the floor' to the Liberals and entered the Cabinet in his early thirties. His early career was distinctly unimpressive. He was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles during World War I, which led to his description as "the butcher of Gallipoli". He was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 which established the Irish Free State. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division. After losing his seat in the 1922 General Election to Edwin Scrymgeour he rejoined the Conservative Party. Two years later in the General Election of 1924 he was elected to represent Epping as a Conservative. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1926 under Stanley Baldwin and was responsible for returning Britain to the Gold Standard. During the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns should be used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, during the dispute he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country.".

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931 Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was now at the lowest point in his career in a period known as 'the wilderness years'. He spent much of next few years concentrating on his writing, including the History of the English Speaking Peoples (which was not published until well after WWII). He became most notable for his outspoken opposition towards the granting of independence to India. Soon though, his attention was drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler and Germany's rearmament. For a time he was a lone voice calling on Britain to re-arm itself and counter the belligerence of Germany. Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty On Chamberlain's resignation in May, 1940, Churchill was appointed Prime Minister and formed an all-party government. He immediately made his friend and confidant, industrialist and newspaper baron, Max Aitken, (Lord Beaverbrook) in charge of aircraft production. It was Aitken's astounding business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering that eventually made the difference in the war.

His speeches at that time were a great inspiration to the embattled United Kingdom. His famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat" speech was his first as Prime Minister. He followed that closely, prior to the Battle of Britain, with "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."

He paid the Royal Air Force the highest compliment after the Battle of Britain with "Never in field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many, to so few".

His good relationship with U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt secured the United Kingdom vital supplies via the North Atlantic Ocean shipping routes. Churchill had also established the Special Operations Europe (SOE) that attempted guerrilla operations in occupied France, with notable success.

Churchill was one of the driving forces behind the treaties that would re-draw post-WWII European and Asian boundaries. The boundary between North Korea and South Korea were proposed at the Yalta Conference, as well as the expulsion of Japanese from those countries. Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were discussed as early as 1943 by Roosevelt and Churchill; the settlement was officially agreed to by Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam (Article XIII of the Potsdam protocol).

One of these settlements was the boundary between the future East Germany and Poland at the Oder-Neisse line, which was rationalized as compensation for Soviet gains in Ukraine. As part of the settlement was an agreement to continue the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the area, which arguably had begun as a program after 1920 when Poland had been given the Polish Corridor by Britain and France. The exact numbers and movement of ethnic populations over the Polish-German and Polish-USSR borders in the period between the end of World War I and the end of World War II is vastly difficult to determine. This is not least because, under the Nazi regime, many Poles were replaced in their homes by the conquering Germans in an attempt to consolidate Nazi power. In the case of the post-WWII settlement, Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the expulsion of the Germans, despite the fact that many of the ethnic Germans had lived in Poland for generations. As Churchill expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble...A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions..."

Although the importance of Churchill's role in World War II was undeniable, he produced many enemies in his own country. His expressed contempt for ideas such as public health care and for better education for the majority of the population in particular produced much dissatisfaction amongst the population, particularly those who had fought in the war. Immediately following the close of the war in Europe Churchill was heavily defeated at election by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party.

Winston Churchill was an early supporter of the pan-Europism that eventually lead to the formation of the European Common market and later the European Union (for which one of the three main buildings of the European Parliament is named in his honor). Churchill was also instrumental in giving France a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (which he supported in order to have another European power to counter-balance the Soviet Union's permanent seat).

At the beginning of the Cold War he coined the term the "Iron Curtain," a phrase that entered the public consciousness after a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri when he famously declared "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere."

Following Labour's defeat in the General Election of 1951, Churchill again became Prime Minister. In 1953 he was awarded two major honours. He was knighted and became Sir Winston Churchill and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". A stroke in June of that year led to him being paralysed down his left side. He retired because of his health on April 5, 1955 but retained his post as Chancellor of the University of Bristol.

On January 15, 1965 Churchill suffered another stroke - a severe cerebral thrombosis - that left him gravely ill. He died nine days later on January 24, 1965. His body lay in State in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral. This was the first state funeral for a commoner since that of the Duke of Wellington over 100 years earlier. At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at Saint Martin's Churchyard, Bladon, Woodstock, England.

Churchill is believed by several writers to have suffered from bipolar disorder and in his last years, Alzheimers Disease; certainly he suffered from fits of depression that he called his "black dogs".

The United States Navy destroyer USS Winston Churchill (DD-81) is named in his honour. The United States has also made Winston Churchill an honorary citizen, something that country has done only two other times in its history.

Churchill is known as a great wit as well as a politician. Nancy Astor once told him "If I were your wife I'd poison your coffee," to which Churchill replied: "If I were your husband, madam, I would drink it." Another example relates to a report which he received from Admiral Pound, whom Churchill did not rate. On the report he wrote "Pennywise".

Churchill was voted as "The Greatest Briton" in 2002 "100 Greatest Britons" poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public. He was also named Time Magazine "Man of the Half-Century" in the early 1950's.

He notoriously once said that "Poison gas would be a fine weapon against uncivilized tribesmen and recalcitrant Arabs... It should inspire a lively terror."

External link

• http://www.winstonchurchill.org