Winston Churchill by The Editors of New Word City

Author:The Editors of New Word City [The Editors of New Word City]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612307367
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Sour Fruits of Victory

The stage was set for the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and with its success the Nazi defeat was ensured. There would be setbacks, including the desperate Battle of the Bulge, and thousands of lives would be lost before the final surrender. But Winston Churchill had brought his country through a near-death experience lasting five long years. When he told the celebrating throng in London’s Whitehall that “This is your victory,” they shouted back, “No, it is yours.”

In this hour of triumph, a deeply thankful Britain was willing to bestow on Churchill almost any honor he might imagine – except the one he actually wanted, which was another term as prime minister. More than anything else exhausted Britons craved normalcy, a life beyond the suffering and sacrifices of war. Two months later, they ousted his government and embraced a new one, led by Clement Attlee.

In part, analysts blamed Churchill’s defeat on a campaign gaffe, when he suggested that a Labor government “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.” His opponent Attlee adroitly noted that this remark highlighted the difference between Churchill the war leader and Churchill the politician. But it was also true that Churchill’s government was exhausted, and his party’s plans to rebuild the country were sketchy at best. The news of his defeat shocked people the world over.

To some extent, however, Churchill also had himself to blame. The tenacity with which he clung to his convictions wasn’t always a virtue. As a realist, for instance, he knew full well that the empire was bound to dissolve and that Britain itself was a fading power. After his first meeting with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Tehran in late 1943, he told a friend that he felt like “the little British donkey” sitting between the Russian bear and the American buffalo. “I realized at Tehran for the first time what a small nation we are,” he said.

He was not about to acknowledge that publicly, however. “We mean to hold on to our own,” he declared. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

As always, however, Churchill was not to be deterred by defeat, his own errors, or a tragic outcome. As leader of the opposition for the next six years, he stayed in touch with world leaders, worked tenaciously to regain power, and focused attention on the ominous growth of the Soviet empire. During the war, he had overcome his abhorrence of Stalin and communism as a matter of necessity, but postwar relations quickly declined. Churchill was forced to accept Soviet dominance of Poland and the forced expulsion of Germans that resulted in more than 2 million deaths.

In 1946, he became Cassandra once again, heralding the beginning of the Cold War. It is among his greatest achievements. In Fulton, Missouri, at Westminster College, Harry Truman introduced Churchill. He rose to the

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