He Saved Western Civilization

“Victory—however how long and hard the road may be.”

Two days after Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, the Nazi lightning advance conquered Luxembourg in a day. It crushed Holland in less than a week. The Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam to ashes, killing 1,000, destroying 30,000 buildings, and leaving 85,000 homeless. And the Germans would take France in six weeks. Even just a few days after the Germans invaded France, a top French general told Churchill "We are beaten." Churchill said it was the most stunning thing he had ever heard in his life.

"Doom marches on," said Churchill. He said this not in the spring of 1940 but in 1936 in the House of Commons where he was an MP, a 'backbencher' (a member who did not serve a role in the administration). "Virtuous motives, trammeled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness,” he told Parliament, referring to the Nazi government's policy of rapid rearmament.

Churchill believed that the natural state of affairs between nations was war, with periods of peace brief aberrations. He had opposed the Treaty of Versailles, recognizing that its punitive terms would cause Germany to fulminate again the victorious Allies. In 1931, he first publicly warned of a coming war fomented by revenge-seeking Germans. 

As early as 1929, four years before Hitler seized power, Churchill’s friends in the British government began leaking him secret documents showing that Germany was rearming, violating the treaty. Throughout the 1930s, ministry officials, at great risk to themselves, routinely violated secrecy laws to give Churchill the latest secret reports on German militarization.

“I shoot him down…”

Churchill's vision was eagle sharp, his resolve irrefragable. A great mystery it is how character arises. Born to great wealth, Churchill's parents did not love him. Sent away to boarding school at age seven, he was beaten mercilessly for two years. Another child would have cracked or given in to hate. Yet from these miseries arose an unbeatable will, love of freedom, and the instinct to sniff out evil at its earliest incarnation.
In 1930, after a German diplomat met Churchill at a party, he wrote a memo to Berlin saying that Churchill had told him "Hitler...will seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force." 

Shortly after Hitler did take power in 1933, Churchill told another German diplomat in London (who also wrote a memo to Berlin) that there was only one way to deal with Nazis. Comparing them to a mad dog, he said, "If a dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite."

Hitler knew Churchill's views well. He often read translations of his anti-Nazi speeches and articles. He knew Churchill was the one British leader who was unafraid of him. British foreign policy towards Germany in the 1930s often seemed designed not to offend Hitler, so great was the fear of another Great War.

The two men almost met in 1932 in a Munich hotel. A longtime friend of Hitler's offered to introduce Churchill to him, as he knew that Hitler came to the hotel every day at five. Everything was set. 

Then, Churchill, an ardent Zionist since 1908, asked Hitler's friend, "Why is your chief so violent about the Jews?...What is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born? Tell your boss for me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad stayer." When the friend conveyed these sentiments to Hitler, he cancelled the meeting.

Four years earlier the British government had promised the British people it would keep up with—and surpass—German military rearmament. When it became clear that the government had failed to live up to its promise, during a debate in Parliament, Churchill thundered that Britain's leaders had been "decided to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent....We are entering a period of consequences....Germany may well reach the culminating point of her gigantic military preparations..." In his speeches before Parliament, he warned that when war came again the Germans would rip through Holland and Belgium into France.

In that same year, in a series of lectures and newspaper articles, Churchill begged England to wake up: "It is worth a supreme effort—the laying aside of every impediment, the clear-eyed facing of fundamental facts, the noble acceptance of risk inseparable from heroic endeavor—to control the hideous drift of events and arrest calamity on the threshold. Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!!! NOW is the appointed time."

Yet when the time came for Prime Minister Baldwin to select a Minister of Defense he chose not Churchill but a lawyer whose greatest triumph had been to oppose changes to the Anglican prayer book. Not only had Churchill first been elected to Parliament in 1900 at the age of 26, he was his government's civilian leader of the Royal Navy during World War I.

Churchill spent the 1930s in disgrace. The public wrongly blamed him for a terrible British defeat during World War I at Gallipoli, Turkey, when a naval landing he had planned went badly awry. He later changed parties, leading people to think he was inconstant. Perhaps worst, he was a militarist at a time when few in Europe (except the Nazis) thought that war would come in their lifetimes.

“What more can I do?”

At one of his lowest moments in the 1930s he told his fellow parliamentarian (and future prime minister) Harold Macmillan, “I have done my best. I have made all the speeches. Nobody has paid any attention. All my prophecies have turned out to be true. I have been publicly snubbed by the government. What more can I do?”

Now two days after becoming prime minister, Churchill spent the day drafting a radio address to the nation and a speech to Parliament, both to be delivered the next day. Everyone knew England might find its neck under the iron heel of fascism. (In 44 days the Battle of Britain would begin, a prelude to naval invasion.)

In a brief appearance before the House of Commons, Churchill told his nation: "....I would say to the House, as I said to those who've joined this government: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

"We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."

Astonishingly, two weeks later when the Nazi occupation of Western Europe was nearly complete, Churchill's foreign secretary Lord Halifax told the press he would like to "invite Chancellor Hitler to make a new and more generous peace offer."

Churchill saw things differently. He told his family to personally prepare to kill German invaders. When his new son-in-law asked what he could do, Churchill replied, "Get a carving knife from the kitchen and take [it] with you." And to the French he said, "Whatever you may do, we shall fight on forever and ever and ever."

MORAL: Never, never, never quit.

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