Rethinking Churchill: The Cost of Britain's 'Great Man'
Younger critics are re-examining Churchill; not for his prejudices, but for what he sacrificed.
A troublesome figure, Churchill is widely disliked by members of the Global South—many of whom now call Britain their home—for his role in the Bengal Famine, his racial views, and his embodiment of colonialism.
But for the descendants of the supposed victors themselves, the man once hailed as a national hero is now praised with growing hesitation; not because of his prejudices, but because of a looming understanding that Britain had decisively lost.
A Costly Venture
Most know that Britain was in a dire position by 1940. But what’s often omitted from the history books is the staggering speed at which Britain hurtled toward bankruptcy. Even before a shot had been fired, economists estimated that Britain’s gold and dollar reserves would last just two years—if rearmament proceeded cautiously.
This was a significant issue, as Britain and France had agreed not to engage in large-scale offensive operations until at least 1942, at which point their empires would be mobilised in entirety. But on his first day as Prime Minister, Churchill abandoned the financial restraints meant to delay collapse. In his memoirs, he later wrote:
‘From the time I formed the new Government… we followed a simpler plan, namely, to order everything we possibly could and leave future financial problems on the lap of the Eternal Gods.’1
The ‘Eternal Gods’, in this instance, were the Americans. This didn’t concern Churchill—born in the United States and a long-time believer in the blood-ties strengthening the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.
Churchill’s urgency in acquiring arms is understandable in the circumstances; Germany had just commenced the Battle of France. Less so, and what confused his War Cabinet, was Churchill’s blind faith that the United States would not only inevitably pick up the tab, but eventually join the war. He wrote to President Roosevelt:
‘We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff just the same.’2
Roosevelt would, over the coming weeks, unceremoniously brush off French requests for material support, let alone their desperate plea to enter the war. Why should Americans assist their former colonial overlords any more than France?
Bemused at the lack of American sympathy towards their former colonial overlords, Churchill initiated a sophisticated propaganda campaign in the United States, aimed at shifting public opinion against Germany. Americans were convinced not only that Germans were beasts, but that the Nazis had colonial designs on the Americas, as this map forged by British intelligence suggests:
Rejecting Reason, Embracing Ruin
In fact, not only did Hitler not have designs on the Americas, but the idea of invading Britain held little appeal.
For this reason, Hitler was keen to stress his desire for an Anglo-German alliance to successive British ambassadors to Berlin. After all, Hitler felt that the British Empire had a positive influence on the world, and in the event of an Anglo-German showdown, a German victory could only result in the British Empire becoming inherited by the United States, Japan or the Soviet Union.3
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement, capping the German fleet at a maximum of 35% of the size of the Royal Navy, was seen by Hitler as a significant stop towards a mutual understanding of this nature.
In Berlin, senior Nazi officials openly questioned whether Britain had ‘backed the wrong horse’ by renewing its entente with France. There were indeed tinges of regret in Whitehall, for having gone to war to dismantle Prussian militarism, Britain now found itself trying to mediate a postwar order dominated by a vengeful, militaristic France, with which she had genuine animosity.
Even in the final days before war, Chamberlain made a last attempt to avoid catastrophe by proposing a European conference to resolve the Danzig crisis peacefully. Hitler was receptive in principle, but Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, vocally opposed the idea, warning that any delay would be seen as weakness. The proposal collapsed.
Despite Britain’s total impotence to defend Poland, Churchill helped scupper Britain’s final chance at avoiding war through negotiation—dismissing even the appearance of compromise as appeasement reborn.
When Hitler offered a vague but conciliatory peace overture in July 1940—his, ‘Last Appeal to Reason’, claiming that he had never desired war with Britain and wished only for peace between their peoples—Churchill dismissed it out of hand. In Parliament, he scoffed at any suggestion of negotiation, insisting that Hitler’s promises were lies and that peace could only come through unconditional defeat.
It’s easy, in retrospect, to treat that resolve as heroic. But in rejecting even the possibility of negotiation, without testing its sincerity or extracting terms, Churchill foreclosed Britain’s only chance at retaining her empire. What followed was not a war to save Poland, nor to defend democracy, nor the Jews, but a sprawling, improvised campaign fought without clear objectives and under the illusion that moral clarity alone could substitute for material strength.
The Improvised Crusade
As Britain stood alone in 1940, with equipment to outfit a mere two divisions, she had assumed responsibility for the liberation of not only France, but seemingly also the rest of Europe, including the daunting task of somehow wresting Poland from both German and Soviet control. Impressively, however, Churchill would ensure that Britain’s enormous sacrifice would not warrant them the everlasting gratitude of the liberated.
With Anglo-French relations already at breaking point following Britain’s accused eagerness to evacuate France, Churchill decided to attack the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, killing 1,297 Frenchmen, despite Admiral Darlan’s word that the fleet would not be handed over to Germany. Of some 500 officers and 18,000 sailors already in England in June 1940, all but 50 French naval officers and 200 sailors chose to go home rather than stay with de Gaulle.4
To the defeated nations, Churchill, lacking both a continental strategy and the means to execute one, offered only a vision of ‘exterminating’ bombing raids on Germany, despite Britain having far fewer heavy bombers than the Luftwaffe:
When I look around to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure path… and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland… without which I do not see a way through.5
In February 1941, Britain was down to her last $11m in gold and dollars, with eye-watering contracts for materiel with the United States, Britain was sleep-walking into bankruptcy against an enemy, in Nazism, that Churchill would later admit was a far lesser evil than Bolshevism.
Though Hitler and Stalin are often mocked for their understanding of military affairs, Churchill claimed as late as 1943 that Britain, not the Soviet Union—with their army of ~12 million—would dominate Europe.
‘I venture to prophesy that, after the war, England will be the greatest military Power in Europe. I am sure that England’s influence will be stronger in Europe than it has ever been before since the days of the fall of Napoleon.’6
The Poles might have wished Churchill had never bothered. With eventually around 200,000 Poles under Churchill’s command, many would be sent to fight and die in Africa, as the cautious Churchill took an eternity to give a date for D-Day. As the Allies pushed out from the beaches of Normandy, the USSR was already in the process of swallowing up much of Poland.
Three months later, Churchill—the man who had mocked the foolishness of appeasement—travelled to Moscow to bargain with Stalin’s deputy over the fate of Polish territory, without a carrot nor a stick. Years prior, Stalin had concluded that the fate of Europe would be determined by force and not treaties. Shockingly, after over ten million dead, the Soviets were in no mood for charity with the Poles, their historical rival. Churchill wrote in 1953:
‘I wanted the Poles to be able to live freely and live their own lives in their own way. That was the object which I had always heard Stalin proclaim with the utmost firmness, and it was because I trusted his declarations about the sovereignty, independence, and freedom of Poland that I rated the frontier question as less important.’7
After it eventually became clear to Churchill that he had been deceived, Churchill was now forced to confront the reality that Hitler had warned successive British ministers and diplomats about; that of the Bolshevik menace.
And now, with several cities in ruins and debts totaling roughly 270% of Britain’s GDP, Churchill would order the planning of ‘Operation Unthinkable’ - to prepare the British people to invade the Soviet Union over the same cause that hundreds of thousands of Britons had already been asked to die for - Polish independence.
Those Germans whom Churchill had considered barbaric enough to call the ‘Hun’, and had aimed to ‘exterminate’ via bombing campaign, were now encouraged by Churchill to commence rearmament.
This betrays a set of more troubling points. Firstly, Churchill did not truly see Germans as a brutal people, nor did he consider fascism as inherently evil. On multiple occasions he would praise this ideology for its efforts against Communism and Stalinism, which he viewed as the greater evil:
The human tragedy reaches its climax in the fact that after all the exertions and sacrifices of hundreds of millions of people and of the victories of the Righteous Cause, we have still not found Peace or Security, and we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.8
Secondly, and most concerningly, Churchill advocated for Britain’s entrance into multiple wars that she could not hope to benefit from in no small part due to his genuine enjoyment of wartime administration. Several months into WWI, he wrote to Violet Asquith:
“I think a curse should rest on me—because I am so happy. I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second.9
Perhaps this best explains why Churchill, who had advocated for Britain’s participation in both world wars, did not hesitate to plan for a war with the USSR, once again for the relative triviality of Polish independence.
Despite his wartime bravado, Churchill held no special hatred for Germans, nor any overwhelming sympathy for the Jews (who encountered significant bureaucratic barriers when seeking refuge in the United Kingdom). Instead, he used Britain’s instinctual aversion to any power dominating the Continent as a vessel to achieve personal greatness.
If Churchill is not Britain’s worst Prime Minister, then it is only for the tenacity in standing up to such impossible foes. But quietly, though with increasing frequency, younger generations raised on stories of victory, wonder: could we truly have won?
Churchill, Volume II, p492.
W. K. Hancock, British War Economy, p119.
Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, p169.
Mitteilungen über die Arbeiten der WaKo, no. 46, 19 August 1940 (T-120/353/206537–40).
Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 370; Gilbert, p. 668; A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 518; Davis, p. 69.
Luigi Villari, Italian Foreign Policy Under Mussolini (New York: Devin-Adair, 1956), p. 377; Hughes, p. 202.
Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy, p. 368.
Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), pp. iv–v.
Bonham Carter, p. 295; Ferguson, p. 178.