Dan Snow's History Hit - THE LEADERS: Churchill

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Does Churchill deserve the legacy he has? He took the reigns from a foundering Chamberlain and proved himself to be the man the country needed. But of course, he is not a man without controversy or contradiction. In the second episode of The Leaders series, Dan and Professor Phillips O'Brien look at Churchill's biggest strategic moves of the war & how he went from a ridiculed outsider to an energising orator.Phillips O'Brien is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St Andrews. His book is called 'The Strategists'.Produced by Dougal Patmore and Mariana Des Forges.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. 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 fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

Whenever anyone talks about leadership, you can bet this speech pops up. It's Churchill at his most steadfast. His most superb, imperious. It was a speech he gave to the House of Commons in the summer of 1940. A rallying cry after setback, after a disaster, actually. The British Army had been humiliated. The British Army has evacuated via Dunkirk. And Churchill is here to report that wars are not won by evacuations, but by fighting,

by resisting. At this point, the outcome of the war seemed to be balanced on a knife edge. There was a very real threat of a German invasion of Britain, an eventual Allied victory, far from certain. Winston Churchill's wartime leadership has been mythologised, starting with Winston Churchill himself. It is, though, true that he took the reins from Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister who was foundering, and he proved himself to be the man the country needed at that moment. He was a wartime leader unlike any other. But of course, he's also a man.

He's also human. He's full of contradiction. He's full of controversy. And it's always interesting to remember that were it not for 1940, he might be remembered for, well, the first great chunk of his career when he was an ambitious, yes, talented politician, but who had a knack of driving people completely bonkers. He was certainly not the great leader floating above the partisan fray that he would later come to embody.

From alienating pretty much everyone in the Conservative Party before the First World War to a catastrophic campaign in Gallipoli during the war, and then his disastrous mishandling of the gold standard in 1925. If we were talking to people in, say, 1930, well, I think militarily and politically, they would have regarded Winston Churchill as a bit of a failure, not quite having lived up to his potential. I mean, he carries the can for the Dardanelles.

He's forced out of First Lord of the Admiralty. They've got to get rid of him because he's considered too politically toxic. And he is sort of left demoted. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. In our second episode of our Leaders series, I'm going to be joined by Phillips O'Brien. He's a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews. He's the author of the brilliant new book, The Strategists. at the University of St. Andrews. He's the author of the brilliant new book, The Strategists. I'm going to look at Churchill, his strategy,

the moves he made in the war, and how he went from being a ridiculed outsider to a man who kept the world tethered to their radio sets through his astonishing oratory. We're also going to look at just how instrumental Churchill was in the Allied victory, and how his leadership style compares to that of his opponent in Germany. Churchill had always opposed Hitler, even in the early 1930s, before it was really mainstream, before it was fashionable. He warned his fellow politicians about the rise, the threat of fascism in Germany. He recognised, I think, that Hitler was a threat, unlike anything they'd seen before.

But Churchill's concerns were rooted in a British and British Empire perspective. He was mostly concerned about Germany's territorial expansion, what that would mean, particularly for Britain. I think he was less energised by Hitler's domestic policies, his terrible treatment of Jews and other minorities in Germany, his euthanasia campaign. And that's because Churchill was an arch-imperialist. He was steeped in it. He grew up thinking the British Empire was one of those wonderful things that ever happened in the history of the world. He'd campaigned for that empire in colonial battles as a young man. He was certain that the empire kept Britain strong and British imperial strength

kept the world safe. And so when it came to his strategy as Britain's wartime leader, preserving Britain's empire was a bedrock of his decision-making. This is the Churchill biographer and historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Geoffrey, Churchill was born, I mean, he was born into one of the very grandest families in the country, wasn't he? Although the Duke of Marlborough was a duke, and though he lived in an immensely grand palace, Duke of Marlborough was a duke, and though he lived in an immensely grand palace, Blenheim, built by a grateful nation after the first Duke of Marlborough's victories, they were not by any means as rich as some other dukes, and they rather felt it. His father was a younger son, that he was perennially short of money and looking for ways to make it. But he was conscious of his

heritage, of course, from the first Duke of Marlborough. And he was attached to what he called the 200 families who for 200 years had guided the destinies of England and the British Empire, meaning the old patrician class, which was indeed still the ruling class in Queen Victoria's day. And of course, he was born as well in the absolute heyday of the British Empire, which reached its apogee, not quite its largest extent, which came after the Great War. But in the 1890s, it was not just the heyday of empire, but of imperialism. And Churchill was, of course, affected by this. Kipling wrote a famous poem called Recessional, which was a warning against imperial hubris. But it's not a warning that Churchill ever really took to heart.

What about his views on war itself? Initially, he wanted to be a soldier? He ordained that he would be a soldier. I mean, his academic career at Harrow, his public school, was notoriously unsuccessful by his own account as anyone else's. And he might have gone to Oxford, which his father did, but he wasn't considered quite up to it. Or at any rate, it was decided that he would go into the army. So he went to Sandhurst. And even then, he didn't do well enough with his exams to get into the regiment his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, wanted him to

join, the 60th Rifles, who required higher grades than the cavalry. So he joined the 4th of Tsars instead, and then spent several years both witnessing and participating in a quite remarkable number of wars or conflicts of one kind or another. Tell me about all the wars that he was able to go and take part in in the 1890s and early 20th century. I mean, this was a period of unending imperial policing by Britain's vast empire. The first time Churchill witnessed a conflict, it was in late 1895.

They were very lenient in his regiment or in the British army at that time by giving young officers leave. And he took leave to go to Cuba, which was then a part of the Spanish empire. And he witnessed the patriotic rising there and wrote about it. He'd already started, I should say, as his other career as a journalist from a very early age. He was still only 20. And he continued wherever he went to watch wars, he continued to write about them lucratively for newspapers. He then returned to India with his regiment, but was given leave to go to cover what was effectively a punitive expedition by the British across the Northwest frontier to deal with the Pashtuns.

And he wrote in very blunt terms about the brutality with which the British did deal with them, burning their crops and filling their wells. After that, he found himself in 1898 with Lord Kitchener's army fighting against the Mahdis in Sudan, zealous Islamist rebels against British authority. And he not only witnessed the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, but took part in it. And he had said to his mother, I have a keen aboriginal desire to kill these barbarous Mahdis. And he did kill several of them in battle. It was not really a battle in the conventional sense because the British army sustained a few dozen casualties while killing 10,000 people on the other side. And then in late 1899, the Boer War began. And yet again,

Churchill, who by this time left the army and had already stood for parliament unsuccessfully as a Tory, and he got himself commissioned by a newspaper to go to South Africa and reported from there. Churchill in South Africa was experiencing the Second Boer War. It began thanks to tensions between the British Empire, which controlled bits of Southern Africa, and the Boer Republics, the descendants of Dutch settlers who had self-governing states, the Trans Africa, and the Boer Republics, the descendants of Dutch settlers who had self-governing states, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, massive diamond gold mineral wealth found in those Boer Republics, attracted the British gaze. Britain's empire was dragged into war with the Boers, with local indigenous peoples getting caught up in the fighting on both sides. The war saw early Boer victories. Britain was humiliated, but then the British Empire

countered with overwhelming force, scorched earth tactics, and rounding civilian populations up in concentration camps. By 1902, the Boers had surrendered surrendered accepting British rule in name but in practice retaining a lot of autonomy though Britain had won the war fuelled Africana nationalism and it it laid the ground both for future conflict in South Africa but also for white supremacy Churchill was there as a soldier but also somewhat ambiguously as a war correspondent. And he was captured by Boer forces in November 1899 after they ambushed a British armoured train. His position at the time, as I may say, was pretty dicey because when he was taken prisoner, he was wearing plain clothes, civilian clothes, but also armed with a revolver. And there has always been a rule of war observed by every country that anyone wearing civilian clothes and bearing arms could be treated as a franc-tireur

and shot out of hand. But he wasn't. He was taken prisoner and then made this highly dramatic escape, which, of course, he turned into a tremendous yarn. In his escape, Churchill had climbed the prison fence when the guards weren't watching. He'd left behind a note for the Boer, Minister of War. Cheeky. He then trekked through swamps. At one point he hid in a coal mine. He then boarded a freight train to Portuguese East Africa, where he linked up with the British consul, who helped get him onto a steamer bound for the British-held town of Durban. Upon his arrival there, he was hailed as a hero. He didn't stay very long in South Africa. And he was now, by 1900, at the age of 25,

he was very famous. I mean, he was one of the great celebrities of the age. He came back giving a lantern slide lecture, which was the equivalent of a television documentary in those days, called The War As I Saw It. Then he immediately left to go on a speaking tour of North America and making a great deal of money. Did he enjoy war? Was he invigorated by it? Or did he think that was his only path, really, to fame, fortune, success in that or other fields? fortune, success in that or other fields? I think he did enjoy it to a degree which not only might seem repellent to us today, his descriptions of not just warfare in the abstract, but in killing large numbers of people. But I think it had an effect on him that by the time he had led

his country through the greatest war in our history. After 1945, Churchill became very conscious of having seen far too much war. And I won't say he became a pacifist, but he was even haunted by his early years and the memory of having seen so much fighting and so many men killed. killed. In 1900, a returned hero from the Boer War, a known orator, a celebrity in his own right, Churchill turned his eye to politics. He won the Oldham constituency, becoming Conservative MP. But four years later, he switched party to the Liberal Party, a move that seriously tainted him in the eyes of many Conservative politicians and voters. He was already regarded with a certain degree of reserve by some Tories, not just by Tories. I mean, because he was so bumptious and so quickly successful and possibly on the make, not everyone adored or admired him, but he became a notable parliamentary speaker.

And then he did have an honest difference with the Conservative Party or Unionist Party, it was called at the time. And that was over free trade. And Churchill was a lifelong supporter of free trade. And the Tories, and particularly under the impulse of Joseph Chamberlain, were moving towards protection or what was then called tariffs, which was a food tax and it was very unpopular. In the spring of 1904, Churchill dramatically crossed the floor of the House of Commons to join the liberal opposition. He was immediately accused by Tories, including one high Tory paper,

the National Review, of deserting the Tories simply because he hadn't been given a government job. And he was ever after accused of acting out of cynical self-interest, although at the same time, he was often accused of being a reckless adventurer, which is all the more striking because the two accusations are, in a sense, mutually exclusive. A liberal government was formed by Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, and Churchill was given a job as undersecretary for the colonies, and the liberals then won a landslide election. And Churchill held office for nearly 10 years. In fact, he held office nearly 25 years by way of, first of all,

leaving the Tories for the liberals, just before the liberals won the landslide election. Then, after the Great War, quietly deserting the liberals and stealthily rejoining the Conservative Party so that he was able to serve in Baldwin's government in 1924-29 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He himself said, anyone can rat, but it takes someone special to re-rat, to desert one party and then desert that party for the original one. Some deft footwork there. Tell me about his experiences in the First World War, because he begins the war as First Lord of the Admiralty for the Liberals.

He's seen as rather aggressive. As Britain's deciding whether or not to go to war in that terrible summer of 1914, Churchill was certainly in the war camp. How did he run the Navy for the first year and a half, two years of the war? Well, he had been First Lord of the Admiralty for several years before the war and liked to take pride in having prepared the Navy for war, if a war came. He was indeed the party of war. Churchill's response to any challenge was to fight. The war came to his delight, but he saw sooner than most people that the Western Front was going to be a complete deadlock,

that the conditions of war had completely changed. There was no longer a war of movement. The two sides, the Germans on their side and the French and British on theirs, were really incapable of breaking through each other's lines. And he said, there must be something better for the British soldiers to do than to chew barbed wire in Flanders, where the line was. And he didn't single-handed dream up the Gallipoli expedition, but he very much favoured it and favoured it ever after. The Gallipoli expedition of 1915 was a catastrophe. None of its strategic goals were secured and there was a catastrophic loss of life and equipment. The Allies landed on the peninsula with troops from Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and India, but the Turks resisted fiercely.

Soon, this attempt to bypass the trenches of the Western Front was bogged down in terrible trench warfare on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They were as unable to break that stalemate in Turkey as they were in France and Belgium, and the Allies submitted to the inevitable and withdrew. The campaign had cost nearly a quarter of a million Allied casualties, and nearly as many on the other side. The Gallipoli landings were Churchill's idea. He'd helped to plan them, he'd pushed for them, he'd lobbied for them.

It was his strategic baby. And after its failure, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which for my North American listeners is a cabinet position, but in the words of Hamilton, it's not a real job. He resigned in November 1915, and he decided to join the Royal Scots Fusiliers, an army regiment fighting on the Western Front. It never really made any sense at all. The idea that even if the British and the French as well, and of course the Anzacs, the Australians and New Zealanders who landed on the 25th of April 1915, even if they had defeated Turkey and reached Constantinople, and what were they meant to do? It's from Constantinople to Berlin is the same as from Kansas City to New York. I mean, Churchill, he had the insight that the war was not going to be won easily on the Western front. Nobody realized it was another

four years of frightful battles, mostly pointless battles. He was right about that, but he was wrong in thinking that there was a way around that problem. To use a later phrase, he thought that there was a soft underbelly from which what were then called the central powers, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey could be attacked. But one of the lessons of both wars as it happened was to remind us that Europe doesn't have any soft underbellies, not in Gallipoli and not in Italy in 1943. So defeat in the Dardanelles campaign looked like it had torpedoed Churchill's very promising political career. Now, not just the Conservatives, but many on the Liberal benches,

thought he was something of a failure. But like all failure, it can be an essential ingredient of later success. Joining me now to talk about that is Professor Phillips O'Brien. Phil, let's think about the First World War. He was in charge of the Navy initially. He's taking strategic decisions at the highest level, but then he goes and becomes commander of a reasonably small unit, a battalion, on the Western Front. He gets to chew barbed wire. He gets to see the World War up close. Churchill is the most studied probably person in history, or certainly British history. But what's interesting is that when it comes to the

First World War, a lot of the focus is on the early part of the war. It's when he is first Lord of the Admiralty in 1914-15, when he is the driving force in Gallipoli, which ends up being a disaster, the Dardanelles campaign. But I think what's fascinating is what happens after that because he's considered a failure. I mean, he carries the can for the Dardanelles. He's forced out of First Lord of the Admiralty. They got to get rid of him because he's considered too politically toxic.

And he is sort of left demoted. And he's really wondering what his political future is if anything and he makes this decision to try and restore himself rebuild himself he's going to leave parliament doesn't give up his seat but he's actually going to go fight on the western front and he spends six months at the front from the end of 1915 to may, June 1916. And by the way, he's also incredibly lucky. And he hadn't planned this. He comes right after the first battle of Luz and right before the Somme. Now, that wasn't conscious. Had he gone any other time, he would have had a much higher chance of

dying. But he is at the Western Front at a relatively quiet period. But what he sees is not quiet. It is just death. And it's not huge numbers of death every moment. It's just death every day. Grinding. of the trench. And even though he doesn't see a battle, what he sees on the Western Front is stunning to him because there's no bravery in this war. It is just mud and blood and death. And I think that matures him. He had been very boyish. And even though he's described in the cabinet as being very boyish and impetuous and full of daring ideas like the Dardanelles, which go wrong. But after six months in the Western front, he comes back a man, I would say. And someone who realizes, oh, modern war is not anything like I thought it was.

And the key thing is to keep British casualties down. Now, he's doing it because he believes Britain has a population problem. It's smaller than Germany, smaller than the United States, smaller than Russia. So, Britain, in his mind, if it gets involved into a kind of attritional war on the Western Front against the German army, and by the way, his experiences on the Western Front give him a huge respect for the German army. And this influences his view in the Second World War. And when he comes back from the trenches in 1916, the summer of 1916, he has decided we have to basically hold back for a while. We need to use our industrial resources. We don't want to do any mass attacks. He's very depressed about things like the Salmon Passchendaele. He's opposed to these kind of

offensives from that point on. And he believes that Britain's role is to, in a sense, fight with machines, not men. And that's the really crucial moment in that change. And he gets a chance to put that thinking into practice because he becomes the minister in charge of producing those machines, those shells, those vehicles. He gets a chance to produce the machines and to argue for it, but he can't put it into action. And that's why it's an interesting period because he's not allowed back in the war cabinet. British politics at the time, Lloyd George becomes prime minister in coalition with the conservatives. So that you have a sort of a wartime coalition and actually ask with the liberal party become the opposition at that time. But the conservatives are not going to have Churchill in the work cabinet. Then one, they view him as a traitor for switching parties

back before the first world war, but also they believe he's responsible for the Dardanelles. So even though he's minister for production, you would think who should be in the war cabinet? He's not. But that means he has to write a lot of memorandum. And he actually lays out a lot of interesting ideas about movement power over firepower. This isn't about just blowing up what's in front of you.

It's about protecting your own troops so that they can move. And he outlines a series of ideas on war. He, by the way, doesn't want the British army to attack until 1919. His view is that wait till 1919. Lots of tanks. Once the Americans are in the war. I mean, you know, he doesn't want to die. In many ways, you know, from that point on, he's very careful with British lives. He doesn't want the British soldiers to suffer huge casualties. Let's wait till we have the tanks, the aircraft, the Americans are there, and then the Germans will have no chance. He doesn't want to take risks.

So he's changed. The risk-taking is out. Let's talk about 1939. Winston Churchill. What's his worldview? What's driving him? And tell me about his approach to wielding executive power, that kind of energy. considered a cranky old, far too much of a hardliner for British politics at the time. But he believes he has vindication in August, September 1939, when Hitler does attack Poland.

And therefore, he transforms from being a voice in the wilderness and really considered a bit of a fossil to maybe an oracle who someone understood what Hitler was going to be. So Chamberlain, even though he never really reconciles himself to Churchill in a way, brings Churchill back into the cabinet. And he brings him back in as first Lord of the Admiralty. The same job that Churchill had in 1914, 1915, he now has in 1939. And it's just absolutely wonderful. He goes back to the Admiralty and he finds certain things that never changed. Like his old maps were left in the same area. The same

furniture was still in the place. So he settles back into his rhythm of being first lord of the Admiralty. Now, what he does in 1939, this part of the war, the German submarines aren't as active as they were going to be. So what he's mostly concerned with, in his mind, is trying to use naval power to hem Germany in. Probably his greatest campaign, which ends up being a bit of a mixed bag, of course, is Norway. So he plays a role in sending British naval power and forces into Norway. But ultimately, of course, he still remains, at his heart, a believer in control of the North Atlantic. As long as Britain controls the North Atlantic, it's going to be okay. And people comment on his arrival.

I mean, he's like a dynamo. There's an energy there, which you'll see again when he goes to number 10. Which is very different from Chamberlain. I mean, the British government of... This is probably going to... People are going to say it's unfair.

The British government of 1938 and the first half of 1939 is about as languid a group of men as you're going to have. Chamberlain's schoolmaster is still wearing those ridiculous old collars, speaking with a high-pitched voice. I mean, you couldn't be more sedate than Halifax.

It was basically a London club land, very quiet, not assertive personalities in control of the British government. And Churchill comes in utterly different. He gathers energy to him because not a lot of people in the British government have energy in the way that he does. And plus he has the ultimate vindication to many people of being right about Hitler. So I think he plays a very important role in providing the kind of energy the British government needed in 1939-40. It's interesting how quickly, even before he becomes Prime Minister, he's a spokesman in the Commons in particular. People are sort of looking to him to provide that narrative of why we're fighting,

almost straight away. Well, because Chamberlain and Halifax can't do it. And so what's he say? Why is Britain fighting? What's Churchill's view about why Britain's fighting in the Second World War and what he wants the outcome to be? Because Hitler's evil. Hitler is, in his mind, a unique threat and a very scary threat.

Again, coming from his First World War experience, he has a very healthy respect for German military power. But what he sees is Hitler is even more ruthless than Germany's First World War leaders, more willing to take risks, more willing to sort of go to war. So Churchill is very worried about what Hitler represents. It's not the gentlemanly Kaiser or the earlier kind of pre-1914 German leadership. So he believes Hitler is a unique threat. This is before the Brits had seen into Belsen and this is before the unimaginable casualties of the Second World War. Churchill, even in the 1930s, identified, he says, no, he's not Louis XIV. He's not Philip of Spain. He's not Napoleon.

He's not the guy. This is unique in a thousand years of history. How does he get that so right? Well, I mean, it's sort of sense. I mean, maybe it's a bit of a class assumption. Hitler is a working class and that's more dangerous. He's a thug. And he's an ideologue.

He is an outright anti-Semite, which I don't think Churchill's as bothered with. Many people have little elements of anti-Semitism, but Hitler takes it to an extraordinary degree. So I think what it is is just Hitler is different. He's radical. He's not an old gentlemanly German leader. And to Churchill, that is very threatening. that is very threatening. If Hitler can actually take the German military, latent German military might and use it effectively. That is a nightmare for Churchill. His whole world will be overturned. Well, he understands that Germany is the largest land power in Europe. He had seen from 1914 to

1918 that Germany had almost won a German land war. They'd certainly knocked Russia out of the land war. They had tied down the British and the French on the Western front. That Germany fighting on its own with the Austro-Hungarians, bless them, were not a very useful ally. Germany fighting on their own had basically fought Britain, France, and Russia. Come pretty close to Paris. So he is never going to be underestimating what Germany can accomplish militarily. And Churchill's somebody for whom this sort of Whiggish view of history, the progression, enlightenment, and onward, he saw this as a force that could overturn centuries of what

he'd have seen as sort of advances. Well, the big thing is he thinks it is a force that could end the British Empire. I mean, I think that's very important that Churchill has one general thing that he wants to do. He wants to maintain the British Empire. Yes, he does love empire, but he actually sees this as Britain. power because otherwise, Britain is 40 million people on a damp island off the coast of Europe without the empire. He understands or in his mind, without the empire, Britain is not the great power that he wishes it to be. So he is very worried if things happen to conspire to take that empire away. So I think Hitler in his mind does represent a big threat to that. Does Churchill think he's a creature of destiny? Well, my favorite quote about that, which was actually before, I think just before the First World War, Churchill had a very skeptical view of human nature. And he said, you know, we're all

worms, but I am a glow worm. And I think, you know, he partly understands human beings are nasty in his mind, pretty grubby things. But he believed he was a special human being. He's a glowworm. He's not a superhuman. He's not God-blessed. But he understands he has certain characteristics and certain drives that he believes can play a huge, important, and historic role. that he believes can play a huge, important, and historic role.

One of those characteristics, his unwavering determination, his energy. But what about the glow? His ability to convince people, his used words, is that important? He was a brilliant writer. I mean, if you remember, Churchill wrote all the time. The first time people would become aware from Churchill is they would have read a book by him or a newspaper article. And he writes with huge verve, huge passion, which we later see brought over to recordings. So the Second World War speeches, which are in many ways how we remember him now, are very much a continuation

of the kind of way he had been writing for decades before that. So he had a passion in the way he expressed himself, which stands in extraordinary contrast to, say, Chamberlain and Halifax, who simply couldn't do it. They didn't have that ability to rouse people, and Churchill absolutely didn't. You're listening to our Leaders series. More after the break. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions,

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Early summer of 1940, by an astonishing coincidence, Churchill becomes Prime Minister the day that Hitler launches his mighty offensive in the West against France and the Low Countries. At that moment, Churchill's prime minister, he is the great warlord of the British Empire. What are his desired strategic outcomes in the Second World War? I mean, you couldn't have become prime minister at a more extraordinary moment. That as he becomes prime minister, the German army begins streaking through France. And within days, I mean, it's the speed with which France collapses in May of 1940 that is absolutely stunning. In April 1940,

no one thought France would be done by June. Every strategic calculation that Churchill had up until he becomes prime minister is based on the assumption that France survives. He's a huge fan of the French army. Since the First World War, he loved the French Adrian Helmut. He had been a Francophile in many ways in the First World War. And then as soon as he becomes prime minister, he's confronted with a collapsing France within days. And he, in fact, his first trip to Paris right after becoming prime minister is a shock. to Paris right after becoming prime minister is a shock because he's basically confronted with a French leadership, political and military, which is sort of saying that we're in real

trouble and we don't know if we're going to make it. We don't know if we're going to survive. So he has to make impactful decisions right away. And I think the single most important decision Churchill makes in the Second World War is in a sense not to gamble at all to save France. I don't think we can underestimate that importance. That the French are saying, give us everything. Send us every plane you have. Send us every soldier you have.

If you want us to survive, we need it all. And by the way, there might have been a British leadership that could have said, okay, France is so important. And our ability to withstand Germany without France will be so minimal. It's worth taking that risk. Churchill actually goes the other way. Pulls them out of Dunkirk. Doesn't send many back. Just leaves a few British troops.

People forget about that. The French at Dunkirk, they went, many of them, back into France to fight again. He could have sent them back. And the key thing is he keeps the RAF in Britain. And the French want the RAF, lots of the RAF units sent to France to help them fight the German army off. So Churchill's, I don't want to say he sacrifices France because what has happened is the French are losing the battle. That's not a British decision. But the decision he makes is to preserve British power and understand that Britain can still not a British decision. But the decision he makes is to preserve British power and understand that Britain can still win a long war. That it's not just May, June 1940 that will

decide things. And that comes, I think, from his more mature view of how wars are fought by the Second World War. So within weeks, he has to make big decisions. How's he going to conduct that war? How's he going to win that war? Well, he has one wobble on, I think it's May 26th. He first makes the decision, the French press him to send things. He doesn't do it. I'm not going to commit all the British force to France. But by the end of May, it just looks doomed. France looks doomed.

And there is a discussion in the war cabinet one afternoon, should we have negotiations, pushed by, not surprisingly, by Halifax? And Churchill says, well, we need to consider it. That lasts for about three hours. And a few hours later, he simply says, we're going to fight. Because I think what he decides and understands is that actually Britain can't be defeated right now. The Western alliance,

this alliance has lost a battle and the Anglo-French alliance is over. But the world balance of production, if you're, again, say you're a ministry of production figure in 1918 in Britain, well, actually losing France isn't that big of a deal. France has got a big army, but its industrial production is far less than Britain's and of course, far less than the United States. So if you are Churchill, as long as we can tap into American production and keep the US on side with Canada, which by the way, Canada is producing increasingly a great deal, actually the balance of global force is not against us in a way that we are going to lose this war automatically. So the key thing is to double down on preserving Britain,

preserving British production, controlling trade across the North Atlantic, and building up the RAF and the Royal Navy. And that becomes his great focus. So fight on. Yep. Engage the Americans, definitely buy stuff for the Americans. Ideally, bring them in. Well, he would love to have them come in. I mean, what is also a really interesting thing is that Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, who's president of the United States, reaches out to Winston Churchill when the war breaks out. And Roosevelt reaches out to Churchill because Roosevelt is like Churchill, obsessed with naval power, and Churchill is the first lord of the admiralty. So Roosevelt and Churchill had struck up a correspondence, which is quite unorthodox for the president of the United States to be writing to a British

cabinet member, not the prime minister, but the British cabinet member. So they had spent much of 1939 and early 1940 talking about naval power. And basically what Roosevelt was trying to get from Churchill is what's going on in the naval war. So what Churchill knew is that Roosevelt was following this very, very closely and that Roosevelt did want the British to win. I mean, you don't correspond with the British cabinet members if you are neutral in a war emotionally. So Churchill understands Roosevelt has certain impulses with which he agrees on naval power, and also that Roosevelt and the Americans are by nature going to be more supportive to Britain. And he believes there's a very good chance they will get in the war.

He can't say, of course, when that will be. He decides Britain is going to stay in the war in summer 1940, an extraordinarily important decision. Is he going to blockade Germany? Is he going to infiltrate force into Europe and set it ablaze? Is he going to invade? What's his strategy for winning the war? Is he still focusing on not losing? Well, winning the war is to get the U.S. in eventually.

I mean, that is how you're going to win it. By the way, you're going to win the war by making it a global war. And the Soviet Union is still at this point a bit of an enigma as to what it will eventually do. Yes, he wants to light Europe ablaze. I think that is more just to preoccupy the Germans. He understands that's not going to really change the course of the war. What does he want is he basically starts building a huge amount of aircraft. So what is his decision in 1940, in the summer of 1940? Well, what do we need to do? We need to double down on aircraft production and some naval construction. And you can see that's how he's going to fight the war. If I can protect Britain and I can protect the sea lanes, then really there's not much Hitler can do. What is amazing, I think, is how easily they win that competition. The Battle of Britain is the most misunderstood battle because the British look at it as small Britain fighting big Germany. Britain is probably a superior industrial producer.

It's not even close. It's not even close. Britain is actually stronger than Germany in aircraft production in 1940. They have slightly fewer on hand when the battle starts. But what you have on hand when the battle starts never decides it. It's what you make during it and what you can produce. And what actually British production does in 1940 is really remarkable, that they triple, quadruple aircraft production during the course of the year. And that's Churchill basically saying, we are going to build aircraft. So the Germans lose

the Battle of Britain very quickly because there's no way they can win it. They simply don't have the aircraft and they're not producing enough to keep up in that battle. Battle of Britain is over in a matter of weeks, really. It's not a long battle. So before we come to the rest of the war, the big key moments. Churchill, as you say, Phil, so studied as a leader. Tell me a little bit about how he made decisions through the war, how he interfered. Was he a genius? Where do you come down? All this kind of stuff. He's sort of a halfway between a micromanaging Hitler and a more detached Roosevelt, is how I would describe where Churchill sits. So if you're going to talk about the gradations

of war leadership, Hitler and early Stalin are the micromanagers. They really interfere on quite low levels and even tactical levels of time. Roosevelt is much more the grand person setting quite deliberate and distinct ideas, but saying to his people, you make those happen. This is what I want to have happen. You make it happen. And I'm not going to interfere too much in what you're doing. Churchill is sort of in the middle of that. One, because he had been in the military. Churchill is an extraordinarily experienced person.

He'd been in the army and he'd been first lord of the admiralty. There aren't many people who had been an army officer and been the civilian head of the navy. And department of munitions. And department of munitions. He really believed he understood these things. He was by his nature also quite emotional at times. And what he would often do is, you know, he'd have these late night sessions. Essentially, war leaders often stay up later and later. The only exception to that was Roosevelt, who actually started going to bed earlier and earlier because he needed more sleep. But actually, war leaders often stay up late because they're

living in such high tension. So Churchill begins this process of staying late and talking. Now, Churchill would often have some pretty crazy ideas on the war. But what he had an understanding is eventually to realize they were crazy and not to follow through with them, whereas Hitler would have probably tried to follow through on them. Yeah. So if Churchill's military advisors, all of them say, sorry, sir, no, he doesn't overrule them. Hitler would have. Churchill is not going to order an operation if his military advisors say, no, this really isn't going to work. So he does understand certain things that Hitler just doesn't. I'm so struck by people have left accounts of Churchill. They found him brilliant, impossible, naive, genius-like.

I mean, it's very difficult, isn't it, to sort of synthesize his leadership. Well, I mean, so much of it, by the way, comes from the Alan Brooke diaries, too. I mean, in many ways, that's a bit of an overuse because the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, who later becomes Lord Alan Brooke, writes a brilliant diary. And actually quite an extraordinary diary where he records every meeting every day he'll say well we stayed up till whatever and churchill drank and i tried to not drink and we had all these ideas and quite clearly alan book gets frustrated with churchill but what is interesting is for all the complaining in the end churchill always gives way on certain things but the picture we get comes very much from the Alan Brooke diary of

what it is. I always think the more interesting ones are when Churchill meets with Roosevelt. It's interesting how the Americans write about Churchill. They view him as incredibly eloquent, dangerously so, so that Churchill will always come in with his eloquence and make a brilliant argument. And then it's whether he can get that put into place, which becomes the great challenge. You'll listen to our Leaders series. Join us after the break. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Winston Churchill knew he had to drag America into the war. He had no way of forcing the United States to join. So he'd have to woo America with words. He wrote letters. He made speeches. He sent envoys. Little by little, he thought he was cracking it. In March 1941, President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act,

which opened up a flood of industrial support and weapons to the British, still short of joining the war, but really a very, very one-sided form of neutrality. In August of that year, aboard a warship in the North Atlantic, Churchill and Roosevelt crafted the Atlantic Charter, a vision for the post-war world, a hint of what was to come. But Churchill's persuasion alone didn't bring America into the fight. The key moment there was one of fire and fury, December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor. The very next day, Roosevelt stood before Congress and declared war on Japan. Days later, Hitler and Mussolini declared war on the USA, sealing America's fate and their own. The USA was now fully in the war. During 1942, Britain remained the dominant

allied partner, but that wouldn't last. Phil, let's go to January 1943. Churchill's finally, the fall of 1942, he's finally had that elusive, big success on the land. He's defeated German-Italian armies in North Africa at the Battle of Alamein. It's a nice set piece victory. There's a clear advance as direction of travel. He meets with Roosevelt at Casablanca in North Africa. Is this Churchill, the warlord, the winds at his tail, Britain's still in the fight, Britain's still an equal partner? Is this his sort of zenith in terms of his agency? I think so. I think Casablanca represents the high point of Churchill

as a war leader and as a leader of the Allies. Britain has survived, the US is in, the Soviet Union survives, they're going to win the war. But 1942 is a pretty uncomfortable year for the first seven, eight months. You have the horrible losses of shipping off the US East Coast. You have the German summer offensive into Russia in the summer of 42. You also have Rommel doing well in the desert, at least for the first few months of 1942. So the first part of 1942 is uncomfortable. And then in quick succession, boom, boom, from Alamein onwards, the German army and the Germans seem on the back foot. So in January 1943, when Churchill goes to Casablanca

and Roosevelt comes to meet him, they are now thinking about, okay, how do we win the war? This is a plan now. They're going to win it. How do we actually come up with the best possible plan? And what happens at Casablanca is that the British war leadership is just so much more focused and directed. In many ways, Churchill has imprinted on it his view of war about what they want. And what they want is to delay for as long as possible and maybe even permanently delay any invasion of France. They don't want to do it.

This is Churchill from the First World War. The last thing he wants to do is have a mass British army fighting on the Western Front again. No interest. army fighting on the Western Front again. No interest. What he wants to do is to fight in the Mediterranean, bomb Germany, and let the Soviets do the land war. That's his strategy, you might say, ideally for the rest of the war. That's what he would have liked to have done. Bomb the Germans from the air, make the Mediterranean the primary theater for the British and the Americans, take Italy eventually or the Balkans off underbelly, but avoid a large land commitment, mass army fighting on the European continent against the

Germans. And in Casablanca, he sort of gets Roosevelt to agree to that in 1943. So what he does is he runs into an American leadership that is quite disorganized. The head of the Navy wants one thing. Ernest King, the head of the army, George Marshall wants another thing. Roosevelt sort of wants everything or nothing. He's not quite sure what he wants at that point. But the British know exactly what they want. And they basically take advantage of disorganization in the American camp and the fact that Britain is still an equal producer. You know, American production is ramping up clearly, and America will soon be drastically

outproducing everybody. But at this point, the British are still building aircraft like the Lancaster in very high numbers. They're still doing most of the fighting. I think that's the important thing. Early 43, the British are doing most of the fighting. And this allows Churchill to play, I would say, a superior role in determining what will happen in 1943. With this soft underbelly Eastern Europe stuff, is this Churchill thinking about post-war? Is he thinking about Stalin in Eastern Europe? Is he really playing 3D chess here? This is one of the things where often people forget now.

If you were saying from the point of view of Britain in 1900, what's the key waterway of the world? It's the Mediterranean. So Churchill grows up as a Mediterranean obsessive. So if you can control the Mediterranean and through that the Suez Canal, that is the key waterway. So if you are looking at maintaining the British Empire, it's far more important to control the Mediterranean than, say, the Baltic or anything like that. And so what he wants to do, and a lot of his war strategy had been in 4142 to make sure North Africa remains British, that the Mediterranean, that's why he holds Malta, the certain things that he's doing to make sure that Britain maintains itself in the Mediterranean. It also, by the way, means he doesn't have to have a large

land army. This is important. He doesn't want to have people sent in these sort of large infantry formations to fight the Germans. I actually don't think he wants to go in the Balkans personally. I think he's trying to use that to simply say, let's not do France. Let's focus on Italy. Let's do that or the Balkans if needs be. But it's not so much that he's desperate to do the Balkans. It's just he does not want to invade France. And what he gets from Roosevelt in Casablanca is a decision not to invade France in 43, a clear one. Moreover, he gets a commitment from Roosevelt to make the Mediterranean the main theater of effort in 43 and to invade one island, which turns out to be Sicily. So it's a real, you might say, strategic triumph for Churchill for his view of the war.

Phil, let's come to the end of 1943 now. Let's talk about the Tehran Conference. Is this when he starts to get a little bit nervous? A bit nervous is a bit kind way of putting it. Casablanca is the high point. And from there, we sort of have to say it's downhill because what happens from that point on is that Roosevelt sort of comes back from Casablanca and says, you know, I think we were hoodwinked. get in Roosevelt's mind any clear decision on how the war will be ended. So what Roosevelt and really his chief of staff, William Leahy, from after Casablanca onwards, are entirely committed to is an invasion of France in 44. They want that. They didn't want to invade France in 43, but they really want to invade France in 44. Just out of interest, why? Because that's the quickest way to Berlin? Or because are they

worried about Western Europe post? Both. Okay. They do believe you are going to have to have a large land army in Northwest Europe to seize Western Germany. Remember, even up until the summer of 43, the Germans are very far into the Soviet Union. The idea that somehow you would quickly be in Berlin on the border of Germany a year and a half later would have seemed very far-fetched. So their view in early 43 is that at some point you are going to have to invade France and then sandwich Germany between these two large forces. What they don't believe is that they will have the force to do it without taking too much risk until 44.

They believe by 44 they'll have enough. They will absolutely be able to swamp the Germans. But they don't believe that will be risk until 44. They believe by 44, they'll have enough. They will absolutely be able to swamp the Germans, but they don't believe that we'll be ready till 44. And basically for the rest of 1943, after Casablanca, they are trying to bludgeon Churchill to agree to D-Day. And this begins in what's called the Trident Conference in Washington in May 1943. It continues through the first Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. And then it reaches its high point in Tehran. So you might say that everything after Casablanca are the Americans trying to bludgeon Churchill into agreeing to D-Day. What Churchill does is usually agree, but then try to back out on the deal. So,

well, okay, we'll agree. And in May 1943, yes, he agrees to invade France in May 1944. But then when Italy looks like it's collapsing in the summer of 43, he's like, okay, we can, let's go into Italy. And so we don't have to invade France in 44. So he's always trying to find ways out of it. But Tehran becomes the moment when he can't. And that's the problem for Churchill at Tehran, is that he has not just Roosevelt, he's got Stalin. His first time Roosevelt and Stalin have been together, he has always met them separately. He's always been the go-between, hasn't he, in a way? And Roosevelt and Stalin get together, and they basically just bash him into submission. Is that a matter of personalities? It's a matter of

strategy? Or is there also a sense here that the Soviets and the Americans start to realize, hang on a second, the British empire is weaker than it looks and maybe does not have the place in the post-war world that Churchill think it does? What's going on here? It wasn't that they thought Britain would instantly collapse as a great power. The United States was at this point showing it was industrially in a league of its own. And the Red Army was showing it was going to be the largest army in Europe. Remember, if you're looking at it from a point of view of Stalin, you actually think the Americans are going to go home after the war. In that case, you're going to be sitting there in very good position with this mass army in Europe, because the British are not going to have the mass army of the kind that you're creating.

So I think both Roosevelt and Stalin believe Britain is going to matter. And so they always talk about the big three. These are going to be the post-war alliance. But they also know that Britain is going to be struggling a bit after the war, particularly if the Americans go home. And also, Roosevelt and Stalin have that same basic idea that you want to invade France in 1944 to end the war. So it's both a long-term and a short-term perception. And Churchill feels it, doesn't he? He starts to say, I am being frozen out here. If you read what happens at Tehran, which very interesting, again, personal difference. Stalin tells Roosevelt that there's all these assassination plots. Why don't you come stay in my compound? And Roosevelt goes,

which is itself an extraordinary decision. But basically, Roosevelt and Stalin are living in the same place in Tehran, and Churchill has to commute in and out from British residence. And that means that Stalin and Roosevelt meet alone without Churchill. And in fact, their first meeting sets the tone. The first time they ever meet, basically Roosevelt is trying to ingratiate himself with Stalin. And one of the ways he tries to ingratiate himself with Stalin is say, I'm not one of these old European imperialists. I'm not like the British and the French. I believe in a newer world and we're going to get along so they can use Britain both as something to attack, to bring them together. So I think that's what happens at Tehran.

So we Brits are very bad at chalking up every success to Winston Churchill in the Second World War. But talk me through what you think his strengths were as a war leader. Well, I actually think his strengths are as a military industrial leader 1941 to 1943. And I don't think we can underrate the importance. One, Britain wins the war in the North Atlantic. That actually is the fundamental campaign of Anglo-American victory. If you cannot win the war in the North Atlantic, it's going to be very hard to knock Germany out of the war because you're going to have to ship everything across the Atlantic. The British do the vast majority of the fighting in the North

Atlantic. The Americans take a pretty small role. So the triumph in the North Atlantic is a military industrial technological triumph of British armed forces. Radar, British shipping, British air power, all of that comes together. And Churchill is the driving factor in that. This is something that he focuses on a great deal of his time and he helps win. That is a great decisive victory is what happens in the North Atlantic. Winning the war at sea, Churchill plays a huge role in that. And that we have to give him a enormous amount of credit.

What we had talked about earlier, he makes the decision to fight on in 1940 and to keep the RAF growing in strength, which wins the Battle of Britain. And another war leader, Halifax, might not have done that. You could see a war leadership that would have cut a deal with Hitler in 1940. Not only does he not cut a deal, but he starts energizing British production in a way that I think is really quite remarkable. And Britain really peaks in production at 43. They really skyrocket.

And they are maximizing industrial potential in a way that no other power does to that point. Then they have to level out because they are literally making all they can make. They're doing that. So I would think that period from 40 to 43 is Winston Churchill's great period in the war. Does he energize the war effort in terms of the population, the global population, but also the energy within Whitehall, sacking generals in North Africa. Does he do more good than harm in that respect? It's really hard to say because testing public opinion in a war is not easy to do.

The key thing is what he does for the British people. No people really listens to war leaders of another country that much. We often like to think they do, but I don't think it's the case that Churchill inspires Americans or Roosevelt inspires Brits. It's what you do with your own population. The British population during the Second World War doesn't lose faith that it can win. At no point does the British population think we are going to lose the war? And that has to have a lot to do with Churchill. Because at least he provides the population with a basic confidence that their border leadership will give them a real chance of winning. And what about the inside game? His effect on the British military and political elite. Does he instill that same sense of confidence? And does that matter?

I think in many ways the British military is quite professional and they always believe they're going to win. So, I mean, I don't think they actually do believe they're going to lose. So, they don't need Churchill to tell them that. So, I'm not so sure it's that. I think what he does actually, interestingly, politically, maybe to the detriment of his own political future, what he's quite, I think, smart on, though conservatives might hate it, is he turns over a lot of domestic policy to labor. So why does Britain end up with the welfare state it has? It's because labor actually runs domestic policy during the war. He's turning to Attlee, and Attlee becomes deputy prime minister during the war. And what Churchill

actually does is run a coalition really well. He runs a coalition government during the war. And what Churchill actually does is run a coalition really well. He runs a coalition government during the war, and he gives labor a great deal of authority because he actually doesn't like domestic policy. Churchill, he likes world policy and all of that. And that actually makes for a very effective team so that Britain has very strong bipartisan leadership during the war. And a lot of that is because Churchill is willing to cede power in the domestic area. How about all his action this day memos? He's going to Bletchley Park and saying, give Turing everything he wants. I mean, there's so much myth-making around that.

Was that creative? Was it constructive? I hate this idea, decisive moments, you know, that someone does one order and it changes the thing. Wars are won through the creation and application of strength. And it's not something where you wake up one morning and write an order and that changes everything. Personally, I don't get that excited by those kinds of moments. I'm more looking at the steadily accumulation and application of strength. And that's what Churchill does very effectively from 1940 onwards, is he continues building up British strength and actually using it quite effectively where he can.

Phil, just one last thing about Churchill. He dies considering himself a failure. Well, he does contribute to the total destruction of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. But by his other own criteria, he does fail. The British Empire is utterly eclipsed. Yeah. I mean, he is always fighting for the greatness of Britain. He is in his mind a British patriot and he wasn't fighting the war to have the United States and Soviet Union supplant Britain. That's not his primary strategic goal. So you might say, yes, he defeats Hitler, but in many ways, tragically for him, he lives a very long life. He's very depressed after the war.

William Leahy, who was Roosevelt's chief of staff and becomes friendly with Churchill. And he visits Churchill in the late 40s in London. And Churchill invites him over to his house for dinner. And this is after Indian independence. And Churchill is trying to scheme how to get India back, and even how to get Ireland back. Churchill is living in a fantasy world or a desperate fantasy world of trying to recreate the British Empire of 1900, say. And so that is, for him, ultimately a failure, that Britain does not remain what he wants it to remain. wants it to remain. The leader that Britain needed in 1940,

at a moment of astonishing peril, the war leader, was not the peacetime leader that Britain needed or wanted. The British voters had become distrustful of the Conservative Party, of their foreign and domestic policies in the 1930s. They were distrustful of imperial rivalries, of foreign adventures. And so the very qualities in some ways that had made Churchill a great leader in war

now doomed him in domestic politics. He was voted out decisively by the British electorate in July 1945. For six years, he watched from the opposition benches, warning now of the dangers of rising Soviet power. In 1951, at the age of 77, he returned as Prime Minister. He didn't win more votes in that 1951 election, which means that Winston Churchill never got more votes than the opposition in any election in which he was leader. But the curiosities of the British electoral system saw his Conservative Party win slightly more seats

than Labour. The Winston Churchill of his second premiership was not the Churchill of the war years. Age had caught up with him. His health faltered. He was no longer a great orator, nor was he an imperial strategist. He struggled to keep up with the shifting world order. Britain's empire shrank. The Cold War deepened. In 1955, Churchill stepped down. He handed power over to his long-time understudy, Anthony Eden. A series of strokes left him weak. Churchill retreated to Chartwell, his beloved home. On January 24th, 1965, 70 years the day after his father's death, Winston Churchill passed away.

His funeral was the greatest gathering of world leaders and monarchs for decades. The great cranes of the River Thames bow as his coffin passed, a silent salute to Britain's great wartime leader. In our next episode, we'll be looking at our next wartime leader, Benito Mussolini, the man who dreamed of a new roman empire who seized power with grand promises of strength and order only to leave italy in ruins his legacy a cautionary tale of ambition dictatorship hubris terrible decision making an ultimate total failure join us on wed Wednesday the 12th of March for that one.

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