The great German war against Western Europe arrived like the Red Horseman of the Apocalypse, with strife, famine, and death on his heels. The date was May 10th, 1940, and the armies of Adolph Hitler swept into Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. As Providence would have it, that very same day, King George VI of England handed the seals of the Prime Minister’s office to Winston Churchill, and one of the most remarkable war leaders of all time rose to power.

By Monday the 13th, the German armies were triumphant on every front and the prospects of stopping them seemed remote. Prime Minister Churchill addressed Parliament on that day in a speech that was not broadcast to the nation by the BBC. They summarized his speech in two news bulletins that evening by quoting one short passage: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”  That was the first of many inspirational speeches Churchill delivered in 1940, but the impact of his words came later as they were reprinted and read worldwide.

Such an enormous crisis called for an extraordinary individual who could realistically assess the dangers, tell the people plainly what they could expect, and steel their nerves to resist to the end. Churchill was that man. It has become fashionable for some libertarians to bash Winston Churchill as an unprincipled power-grasping statist who helped lead the world into an unnecessary war. Most people who have read Churchill and his biographers, would conclude he was a flawed individual-who isn’t? Of course, if your flaws end up killing twenty million people it should make it improbable you would be named “Man of the Century.” Churchill did not start the war and cannot be held responsible for its enormities.   

Churchill was out of power in the 1930s but rightly understood the threat posed by Adolph Hitler. When put in a position to deal with Nazi aggression, they had already aggressed and were well on their way to the overthrow of the nations of Europe. When only Britain was left, Hitler thought a reorganized English government would sack Churchill, install a peace party and sue for a rapprochement with Germany, perhaps become a junior partner in a reorganized continent with Nazi tyranny enshrined for a thousand  years.

Instead, Churchill delivered his belligerent speeches of no compromise and a willingness to lose everything to preserve Christian civilization. Because he intended to preserve the British Empire in the process and expanded the powers of the state to do so, his American critics then and now continue to denounce his policies and goals. Ralph Raico in an essay entitled “Rethinking Churchill” concludes his assessment of Churchill’s life with the following:  

When all is said and done, Winston Churchill was a Man of Blood and a politico without principle,  whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.

I can’t agree that Churchill was a man without principle and, while Raico’s article does have some merit, I think that Major General J.F.C. Fuller’s estimate of the man rings more true:

Churchill was a man cast in the heroic mold, a berserker ever ready to lead a forlorn hope or storm a beach, and at his best when things were at their worst. His glamorous rhetoric, his pugnacity, and his insistence on annihilating the enemy appealed to human instincts, and made him an outstanding war leader.

Bill Potter