The man who saved the world

1. John Steele Gordon

Who was this man whose death was marked by such extraordinary attention and who, half a century later, remains a household name?
Fifty years ago, on January 24, 1965, Sir Winston Churchill died at the age of 90 and the world took note.
State funerals in the United Kingdom are usually reserved for sovereigns. Indeed, over the last 300 years there have been only 10 accorded to British subjects, including such towering historical figures as Sir Isaac Newton, Admiral Lord Nelson, the first Duke of Wellington, and Prime Minister William Gladstone. There have been none since Churchill’s.
One hundred and twelve countries sent representatives (only China did not). The funeral was broadcast live across Europe and, with satellite technology then in its infancy, to the United States when the low-earth-orbit satellite was in position (for about 20 minutes out of each hour and a half). I cut college classes that day in order to watch it.



Churchill’s body lay in state for three days at Westminster Hall and then a vast cortege made its way through London to St. Paul’s Cathedral, the caisson pulled by sailors of the Royal Navy. The Royal Artillery fired a 19-gun salute, the number accorded a former head of government. At St. Paul’s, a service was held, attended by one of the largest gatherings of statesmen in the 20th century. Among the hymns sung was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a reference to Churchill’s American-born mother and his lifelong affection for the United States. After the service, his body was taken to Waterloo Station and from there to St. Martin’s Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire, the parish church of Churchill’s ancestors the Dukes of Marlborough, where it rests today, amid centuries of Churchills.
During his lifetime, Churchill had received nearly every honor there is to be had. He was a Knight of the Garter, an honorary American citizen, and a fellow of the Royal Society. Churchill College, Cambridge, founded in his honor, holds his papers. He earned the Nobel Prize for Literature. There are town squares, avenues, and schools around the world named for him, including four high schools in the United States. An American destroyer, the USS Winston S. Churchill, was launched in 1999. His statue stands in many of the world’s great cities, including Paris, Prague, and Washington, D.C.
Who was this man whose death was marked by such extraordinary attention and who, half a century later, remains a household name, familiar to every school boy and girl?

During his lifetime, Churchill had received nearly every honor there is to be had.

He was, simply, the man who had saved the world.
Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, as the Nazi armies were pouring into France, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Soon most of Western Europe was in German hands and Britain stood alone. Through the miracle of Dunkirk, much of the British army escaped capture, but their equipment had all been abandoned. In the summer of 1940, the only fully-equipped division in the whole of the British Isles was Canadian. The situation could hardly have been more desperate. As Churchill explained, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”
To be sure, the Royal Navy greatly outclassed the Kriegsmarine, and the Royal Air Force was intact but smaller than the Luftwaffe. If the Luftwaffe could have achieved air superiority over the English Channel for even a short time that summer, an invasion of Britain would have been possible. Once ashore, the Wehrmacht would have been all-conquering.
Many in the British establishment argued for a negotiated peace with Hitler, and Hitler had made it clear that he would give Britain easy terms. His principal interests lay in the east and he wanted a free hand there. Churchill, however, would have none of it. He regarded Nazism as an unalloyed evil that had to be destroyed, and if Britain had to fight it alone, so be it.
His greatest political weapon was his utter mastery of the English tongue and the art of oratory:

What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over … the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. 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. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, 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.”

His words and his fierce determination rallied the British people during the Battle of Britain. It was, indeed, their finest hour as they carried on during the Blitz and the desperate air battles over southern England. The Royal Air Force managed to hold off the Luftwaffe, if just barely, and Hitler had to call off the planned invasion. As Churchill said of the pilots and ground crews of the RAF, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
But if Britain had been spared conquest, she could not win the war alone, even with the help of the still-vast British Empire. When the United States, with its limitless resources of men and industrial strength, finally entered the war in late 1941, however,  the situation changed radically. Churchill wrote that on the night when he heard about Pearl Harbor, “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
The United States quickly became the dominant partner in the struggle against Hitler, but Britain was an invaluable ally and the British Isles provided a base from which the reconquest of Europe and the destruction of Nazism could be launched. Had Britain fallen, it would have been much more difficult for the United States, with all its power, to win the war against the Nazis.
And without Churchill, Britain might well have decided that realpolitik was the best course and made peace, making Hitler the master of Europe. If we have lived in the “broad, sunlit uplands” of peace and prosperity since 1945, it is because of Sir Winston Churchill.

Many in the British establishment argued for a negotiated peace with Hitler, and Hitler had made it clear that he would give Britain easy terms.

Churchill was one of the great statesmen of world history. But had he never set foot in the House of Commons, he would still be remembered today. He led one of the most remarkable lives of modern times. Born the grandson of a British duke and a New York millionaire, he attended Harrow and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. The next few years were filled with adventure and heroics as he both fought as a soldier and worked as a war correspondent, a time recalled in one of his many immensely readable books, My Early Life (1930).
He entered Parliament in 1900, but in those days members of parliament were not paid and he had to earn a living, which he did with his pen and on the lecture circuit. He became one of the highest-paid journalists of his time and wrote books, including scholarly biographies of his father as well as John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, that are among the best in the English language. He is one of only two people who wrote nonfiction to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He was famous for his wit and his gifts for repartee and phrase making. Spying the famously self-regarding Sir Stafford Cripps one day, he turned to a companion and said, “There but for the grace of God goes God.” Regarding secrecy, he wrote that, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Regarding taxation, he said, “We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Churchill opposed the policy of appeasement followed by Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. “An appeaser,” said Churchill, “is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last.” Of Baldwin, he said, “He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” Of Chamberlain, after the Munich conference, he said, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Churchill is one of a handful of writers who have entire books of quotations devoted just to their work.
It has been said that a person is truly assured of immortality when his name becomes an adjective: Newtonian, Lincolnesque, Darwinian, Freudian, Shakespearean. There are few compliments a person in public life can receive that are greater than to be called Churchillian.
John Steele Gordon has written several books on business and financial history, the latest of which is the revised edition of Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt.