Churchill in WWI

The first thing to know about Lloyd George’s premiership is that it destroyed the Liberal Party. Internecine fighting opened the door for the Labour Party (which joined the wartime coalition). A few years later, moving from minor third-party status, Labour formed a government. The Liberals would never govern again.

“He represented the French people risen against tyrants—tyrants of the mind, tyrants of the soul, tyrants of the body; foreign tyrants, domestic tyrants, swindlers, humbugs, grafters, traitors, invaders, defeatists—all lay within the bound of the Tiger; and against them the Tiger waged inexorable war. Anti-clerical, anti-monarchist, anti-Communist, anti-German—in all this he represented the dominant spirit of France.”

Churchill’s vivid accounts of Clemenceau reflected, though hardly created, his own persona. He was The Tiger’s leading Anglo-Saxon student.

Unknowingly, General Haking assisted in one of the narrowest of Churchill’s many escapes from death. “Over me,” said WSC, “beat the invisible wings.”

Prudence, Aristotle’s primary quality of statesmen was well demonstrated by Churchill at the Admiralty in the years leading up to the First World War.

No evidence exists that Churchill wished to commit a million Allied troops. The British contingent he envisioned was small, and made up of volunteers. Above all, Churchill wanted decision, not hesitation, which he abhorred all his life.

The Agadir Crisis of 1911 awakened Winston Churchill to the possibility of war with Germany and led to him being appointed to the Admiralty.

The war was over. Was it a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Or would we unite our genius “in safety and freedom”? We now know the answer.

HMS Enchantress was Churchill’s personal transport as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1911-14. Like most of his luxuries, it served also as a focus for work. During his time aboard the vessel, Churchill would visit hundreds of naval establishments and ships in the British Isles and the Mediterranean.

Churchill’s insistence on victory was not born of revenge or malice. He insisted that “we are bound by the principles for which we are fighting.”

Churchill’s faith in personal diplomacy—solving intractable problems by meetings at the highest level—was famously expressed during his World War II meetings with Stalin and Roosevelt. It surfaced again in 1953-55, when he strove unsuccessfully to promote what he called “a meeting at the summit” with Eisenhower and Stalin’s successors. Less widely known, however, is Churchill’s 1914 proposal for a “conference of sovereigns” or heads of state (including, it seems, French President Raymond Poincaré) in an effort to head-off World War I. The scheme failed, but certainly not for Churchill’s lack of trying.

Judgments on history are all too easy in hindsight. Manfred Weidhorn has suggested that if Hitler had been assassinated in 1938 he would have gone down as the restorer of German greatness. If in 1941, the inevitable result of his policies in 1942-45 would have left loyal Nazis pining, "Ach, if only der Fuehrer were still alive." I suppose that if Churchill had been killed on the Western Front, where he went to fight in 1916, we would still have these inaccurate views of his attitude toward war, spread about by everyone from pot-stirrers to serious and admirable historians. I am sorry about that.