Winston Churchill

30 November 1874 (Woodstock, Oxford) - 24 January 1965 (London). British politician and national icon. Prime Minister 1940-1945 and 1951-1955. Major role in the Second World War as Prime Minister and in the alliance between Great Britain, the United States and the USSR.

Born Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. His father Lord Randolph Spencer, son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was a politician in the Conservative Party and his mother Jenny Jerome, daughter of a businessman, was an American. She was born in Brooklyn, NY but was raised up in Paris because her parents appreciated the culture in Europe and considered it as their second home. Churchill married Clementine Hozier in 1908 and had five children with her. They were married until his death in 1965.

Education and First War Experiences

Churchill attended Harrow, a famous Public school, from 1888-1892. There he decided to go to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and took the Army Class at Harrow’s in order to prepare for the entrance examination. He failed the first examination but passed the second examination and qualified for the cavalry in 1893. In 1895 he graduated from Sandhurst and had the desire to join the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. After the help of his mother who wrote letters to the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the Army in order to accept him at the Hussar’s, Churchill was officially commissioned on 20th February 1895 and went to Aldershot where his regiment was stationed. In the same year he left to take part in the Colonial Wars in Cuba (he joined the Spanish troops and got the Spanisch decoration “the Order of the Red Cross”), India and Sudan as Cavalry Lieutenant. During this period he started to work for the Daily Graphic and earned five guineas (British Coin) for each letter he wrote. He continued to write letters to newspapers and in 1899 the Morning Post hired him as a war correspondence for the upcoming Boer War and sent him to South Africa. During an operation he was made prisoner of war along with two officers and fifty soldiers and they were brought to Pretoria. But after some weeks of imprisonment he managed to escape and reached the British Consulate after six days. The Boer War ended in June 1902 and Churchill left South Africa earlier in 1900 and headed towards Great Britain.

Back in Great Britain and First World War

In 1900 Churchill started his political career and was elected into the House of Commons for the Conservatives but joined the Liberals in 1904. The Liberals won the elections of 1905 and Churchill became Under- Secretary for the Colonies. But his political career had just started: In 1908 he was the president of the Board of Trade and became Home Secretary in 1910. In 1911 he became the First Lord of the Admiralty and was responsible for the English Navy. He helped Lloyd George in introducing the first elements of a welfare state and modernized the fleet, i.e. introducing 15-inch guns for battleships. The Great War started in 1914 but he had to resign from his position in June 1915 after the defeat of Gallipoli against the Turks. The personal consequence for Churchill was to join his regiment in France and to fight on the Western Front during the Great War as Battalion Commander. But he didn’t stay very long at the front. One year later he was back in politics and was appointed as Minister of Munitions. Further stages of his political career after the Great War were the position of Secretary of State for War and Air (1919-1921), Minister of the Colonies (1921-1922) and Chancellor of Exchequer (1924-1929). In 1924 he joined the Conservative Party again.

The Road to the Second World War

Between 1929 and 1939 he had no political office for the Conservative Party. He stayed out of politics and started to work as a journalist and historian but still had his opinions about some issues: he was against the Home Rule of India and supported Edward VIII in means of the Abdication Crisis in 1936. But the most important events in the 1930s took place in Germany and Spain: Adolf Hitler became Chancellor to the Republic of Weimar in 1933 and after the death of President Hindenburg in 1934 he called himself ‘the Führer’ and was the Head of the Third Reich and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Churchill saw the coming catastrophe the Germans would bring over Europe but he was ignored by the British. He critized the Appeasement-Politic of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and called for a rearmament of the British troops.

After the Second World War broke out on 1 September 1939, Prime Minister Chamberlain appointed Churchill again as the First Lord of the Admiralty and after Chamberlain resigned he became Prime Minister in 1940. During the war he worked with the President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Atlantic Charter, which was presented on 14 August 1941 and is seen as the foundation of the United Nations (UN) but was still skeptical about the communist Soviet ally. Churchill met with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin for the first time between 28 November and 1 December 1943 in Teheran (Conference of Teheran) in order to discuss the strategy against Germany. They met for the last time in Potsdam (Potsdam Conference) between 17 July and 2 August 1945 to discuss the further plans concerning Germany. During this meeting the Conservatives lost the elections and Churchill was replaced by Clement Attlee (Labour Party) as Prime Minister. On 6 June 1944 (D-Day) the Allies landed on the shores of the Normandy and started to liberate German occupied France and later Europe. On 8 May 1945 (V-E Day) the German troops surrendered and Europe was liberated by the Allies (Great Britain, USA, France and the Soviet Union). Post-War Britain

Shortly after the Second World War Churchill campaigned against the Soviet Union (coining the term "Iron Curtain" in a speech in Fulton, Missouri, USA). Even after his loss in the elections of 1945 he didn’t retire from politics. Churchill was the leader of the Opposition and became Prime Minister again in 1951 and served until 1955. As mentioned earlier he worked on several books and published several of them and for his work “The Second World War” he received in 1953 the Nobel Prize for Literature. Later in 1956 he received the “Internationalen Karlspreis der Stadt Aachen” for his achievements for the unity of Europe and in 1963 he was announced “Honorary Citizen of the USA” by the US Congress. Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965 in London.

Sources

www.winstonchurchill.org

www.dhm.de (Deutsche Historische Museum)

Pelling, Henry. Winston Churchill. London: Macmillan, 1974.