He was the man of great victories and great defeats, of right decisions and wrong decisions. It was the man who he beat Hitler and was defeated in the election. If there was a ranking of great statesmen of every era a place on the podium would certainly belong to Winston Churchill. With all his contradictions he made history, and the world must thank him for saving him from the Nazi nightmare, even if he failed to chase away the communist one he opposed with equal determination.
The English repaid the prime minister who had promised them alone with ingratitude in the ballot box effort, sweat, blood and tears in war for survival against Germany, and against the Third Reich which would never have surrendered: he had kept his word, as always in life, even in paradoxes, even in scathing phrases and in the acumen of the aphorism. It was prime minister only for 9 years and five were those of the Second World War, but British politics for half a century, and world politics, would not have been the same without him. An esteemed journalist, a writer generously awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953, a stubborn soldier but not lacking in common sense and foresight, he was born to command, over himself and others.
Ancient English nobility and American blood
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 150 years agoin 1874, descendant from an ancient noble family (the Dukes of Marlborough) and an American mother from an excellent family, Jennie Jerome. He was the living example who, as he said, English and Americans were peoples separated by the same languageand he distantly even had drops of blood in common with George Washington and some US presidents.
He showed neither precocity in his studies nor discipline, but perseverance and profit in the subjects that really interested him, such as history, and he later filled the cultural gaps by studying the classics and everything he liked. It was his father who directed him to military careernot seeing an academic future for him, and Churchill will manage to graduate as a cavalry cadet. In uniform he has the same proud look that he showed in the photo at seven years old, and which revealed a leader in him. He didn’t lack the spirit of adventure either: war correspondent in Cuba on the side of the Spanish, then in India, in Egypt, in Sudan following the army and then in South Africa in the Anglo-Boer war, officially as a journalist. When he put down his sword he took up his pen and wrote. Taken prisoner by an Italian Legion who fought alongside the Dutch settlers, he ended up in prison in Pretoria and escaped. Instead of returning home he joined the British troops and took part in the battle that won the victory in that war which he recounted in his chronicles published in volume.
The twentieth century between social issues and international politics
The new century for him was that of his entry into parliament and political consecration, first in the ranks of the conservative party and then of the liberal one, denoting an effective style and rare rhetorical qualities, reaching the point of being undersecretary, then minister. Pragmatic and decision-maker, he was no stranger to social sensitivity and it is hisestablishment of the minimum wage and of eight working hours per day for miners. He was the new man, who attracted criticism and controversy, capable of managing internal affairs with care and the creation of the secret services with delicacy, so much so that he bypassed parliament. Author of the modernization of the fleet to make it always superior to the imperial German one, as well as of the development of aviation, from 1911 to 1915 he held the role of first lord of the admiralty.
The sensational failure of the Gallipoli landing, of which he had been a staunch promoter, forced him to resign. He returned to the political scene in 1917 as minister of supplies. The war against Germany was won he preached moderation with the defeated, for fear of a communist revolution on the Russian Bolshevik model which, in his opinion, needed to be “strangled in the cradle”. In 1919 he became Minister of War and worked to support the anti-Bolshevik White armies and Poland engaged in the war against the Red Army. He also vigorously fought the Irish independentists, with whom however he reached an agreement in 1921 for the birth of the Free State. He was openly unfavorable to the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and skeptical about making Palestine a land of immigration for the Jews, who in any case had his sympathy. He was responsible for the birth of Iraq and Jordan and will also become Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The irreducible protagonist of the fight against Nazism
It seemed that Churchill had missed his appointment with history in the great crisis that would lead to the Second World War. He was in fact in opposition when in Munich in 1938 Great Britain and France handed over Czechoslovakia to Hitler triggering the conflict a few months later: with clarity he pronounced the prophetic words “you could choose between war and dishonor, you chose dishonor and you will have war”.
In thethe darkest hour he was called to succeed as prime minister the weak and ill Neville Chamberlain, architect and symbol of appeasement, and proved to be the “lion of Great Britain”. He resisted Hitler’s thrusts with the air battle of Britain which prevented the Germans from landing, he welcomed the governments in exile of the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht, he led the struggle of free peoples. With the cigar in the corner of the mouth and two fingers to symbolize the “v” for victory, it became symbol of irreducibility. As long as he could he also opposed Stalin and his plan for dominance in Europe, but the realpolitik that for once he suffered instead of determining it led him to betray that Poland for whose freedom and independence England had entered the war in 1939. Not even he was tender with the Italian people, despite having cajoled them with the propaganda of Radio London, insisting on the responsibilities of Mussolini and fascism. He said and wrote that the Italians knew how to do everything but insisted on the one thing they didn’t know how to door the war, where they went as if to a football match, and to the football match as if to war. The English whom he had defended from Nazism sent him home after the victory, when the British Empire began to creak and England lost its role as a world superpower.
Home after the elections and returning to a new world
Opposition leader since 1945, the indomitable Churchill would return as prime minister in 1951 and remain in the saddle until 1955, in a changed world, where the Iron Curtain had fallen, a literary image he himself coined, bipolar and with the spasms of decolonization. THE cigarettes, alcohol who drank immoderately but without ever losing his clarity, his passion for the gambling and for gambling in politics, always maintaining a rational vision of things, together with character defects and anachronisms that were part of the ability to analyze and deal with problems, but had never affected his role and authority as a giant of international relations . When the queen died in 1965 Elizabeth II will give him a solemn state funeral.