Winston Churchill
The British statesman who led the defiance against Nazi Germany in 1940, an imperial die-hard whose finest hour outlived the empire he loved.
When Winston Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, he was 65, widely written off as a brilliant failure, and inheriting a Britain on the edge of defeat. Within six weeks France fell, and his answer, that Britain would fight on alone, turned a hopeless position into the defining stand of his life.
The long road to 1940
Churchill crammed several careers into his first six decades. Born in 1874 into an aristocratic family, he served as a cavalry officer and war correspondent, seeing combat in India and Sudan and reporting on the Boer War, where his daring escape from a prison camp made him a national celebrity. He entered Parliament in 1900 and went on to hold nearly every great office of state, but his record was checkered. He was blamed for the catastrophic 1915 Gallipoli landings and, as chancellor, for a punishing return to the gold standard. Through the 1930s he languished in the political wilderness, distrusted by his own party, warning against Adolf Hitler and, just as loudly, against any loosening of Britain's grip on India.
Finest hour
Then came his moment. As France collapsed in 1940, Churchill rejected Nazi peace feelers and rallied a frightened country with speeches promising nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat and vowing to fight on the beaches. He held the nation together through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz and, just as importantly, courted the two allies who would ultimately win the war, forging a close partnership with Franklin Roosevelt and, after Hitler invaded in June 1941, embracing Josef Stalin's Soviet Union. Churchill did not beat Hitler single-handed, but in the year Britain stood alone, his defiance was the line between resistance and surrender.
The empire man and his shadow
Churchill was also a fierce imperialist who saw the empire as the whole point of British greatness. He fought Indian self-rule bitterly, dismissed Mohandas Gandhi as a half-naked fakir, and presided over the 1943 Bengal famine, in which perhaps two to three million people starved while his War Cabinet diverted food and shipping away from India; his private remarks about Indians were nakedly racist. Historians still argue over how much blame he personally bears, but the famine sits permanently beside the victory. British voters, sensing the war leader was not the peace leader, turned him out in July 1945, only weeks after victory in Europe. He returned as prime minister in 1951, won a Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, and died in 1965, honored with a state funeral. His legacy is genuinely double: the indispensable voice against Nazism, and the die-hard defender of a racial empire that was already dying. He remains the hero of 1940, and, to millions once ruled from London, something far more complicated.