He wrote the President copious letters and established a strong personal relationship with him. And he managed to get American help in the Atlantic, where until Britain's lifeline to the New World was always under severe threat from German U-Boats.
Clementine once said that Winston was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings. As Churchill tried to forge an alliance with the United States, Hitler made him the gift of another powerful ally - the Soviet Union. Despite his intense hatred of the Communists, Churchill had no hesitation in sending aid to Russia and defending Stalin in public. The war had now become a global one. But with the might of America on the Allied side there could be no doubt about its outcome. Churchill was jubilant, remarking when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor: "So we have won after all!
However, America's entry into the war also caused Churchill problems; as he said, the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting a war without them. At first, despite disasters such as the Japanese capture of Singapore early in , Churchill was able to influence the Americans. He persuaded Roosevelt to fight Germany before Japan, and to follow the British strategy of trying to slit open the "soft underbelly" of Europe.
This involved the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Italy - the last of which proved to have a very well armoured belly. It soon became apparent that Churchill was the littlest of the "Big Three". At the Teheran Conference in November, , he said, the "poor little English donkey" was squeezed between the great Russian bear and the mighty American buffalo, yet only he knew the way home. In June the Allies invaded Normandy and the Americans were clearly in command.
General Eisenhower pushed across Northern Europe on a broad front. Germany was crushed between this advance and the Russian steamroller. Churchill told a huge crowd in Whitehall: "This is your victory. That evening he broadcast to the nation urging the defeat of Japan and paying fulsome homage to the Crown. From all over the world Churchill received telegrams of congratulations, and he himself was generous with plaudits, writing warmly to General de Gaulle whom he regarded as an awkward ally but a bastion against French Communism.
But although victory was widely celebrated throughout Britain, the war in the Far East had a further three months to run. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally brought the global conflict to a conclusion. But at the pinnacle of military victory, Churchill tasted the bitterness of political defeat. Churchill expected to win the election of Everything pointed to his victory, from the primitive opinion polls to the cartoons in newspapers and the adulation Churchill received during the campaign, but he did not conduct it well.
From the start he accused the Labour leaders - his former colleagues - of putting party before country and he later said that Socialists could not rule without a political police, a Gestapo.
As it happened, such gaffes probably made no difference. The political tide was running against the Tories and towards the party which wholeheartedly favoured a welfare state - the reward for war-time sacrifices. But Churchill was shocked by the scale of his defeat. When Clementine, who wanted him to retire from politics, said that it was perhaps a blessing in disguise, Churchill replied that the blessing was certainly very effectively disguised.
For a time he lapsed into depression, which sympathetic letters from friends did little to dispel. Soon, however, Churchill re-entered the political arena, taking an active part in political life from the opposition benches and broadcasting again to the nation after the victory over Japan. In defeat Churchill had always been defiant, but in victory he favoured magnanimity.
Within a couple of years he was calling for a partnership between a "spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany" as the basis for the re-creation of "the European family". At Fulton, Missouri, in , he pointed to the new threat posed by the Soviet Union and declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe. Only by keeping the alliance between the English-speaking peoples strong, he maintained, could Communist tyranny be resisted.
After losing another election in , Churchill gained victory at the polls the following year. Publicly he called for "several years of quiet steady administration". Privately he declared that his policy was "houses, red meat and not getting scuppered". This he achieved. But after suffering a stroke and the failure of his last hope of arranging a Summit with the Russians, he resigned from the premiership in April Churchill remained a member of parliament, though an inactive one, and announced his retirement from politics in This took effect at the general election the following year.
Churchill died on 24 January - seventy years to the day after the death of his father. He received the greatest state funeral given to a commoner since that of the Duke of Wellington.
He was buried in Bladon churchyard beside his parents and within sight of his birthplace, Blenheim Palace. In the autumn of Churchill, then a rising Liberal politician, married Clementine Hozier, granddaughter of the 10th Earl of Airlie. Their marriage was to prove a long and happy one, though there were often quarrels - Clementine once threw a dish of spinach at Winston it missed.
Clementine was high principled and highly strung; Winston was stubborn and ambitious. His work invariably came first, though, partly as a reaction against his own upbringing, he was devoted to his children. Winston and Clementine's first child, Diana, was born in Diana was a naughty little girl and continued to cause her parents great distress as an adult. In she married John Bailey, but the marriage was unsuccessful and they divorced in In that year she married the Conservative politician, Duncan Sandys, and they had three children.
That marriage also proved a failure. Diana had several nervous breakdowns and in she committed suicide. The Churchills' second child and only son, Randolph, was born in He was exceptionally handsome and rumbustious, and his father was very ambitious for him.
During the s Randolph stood for parliament several times but he failed to get in, being regarded as a political maverick. He did serve as Conservative Member of Parliament for Preston between and , and ultimately became an extremely successful journalist and began the official biography of his father during the s. Randolph was married twice, first in to Pamela Digby later Harriman by whom he had a son, Winston, and secondly in to June Osborne by whom he had a daughter, Arabella.
Neither marriage was a success. The life of Sarah, the Churchills' third child, born in , was no happier than that of her elder siblings.
Amateur dramatics at Chartwell led her to take up a career on the stage which flourished for a time. Sarah's charm and vitality were also apparent in her private life, but her first two marriages proved unsuccessful and she was widowed soon after her third.
Her first husband was a music hall artist called Vic Oliver whom she married against her parents' wishes. Her second was Anthony Beauchamp but this marriage did not last and after their separation he committed suicide. In Clementine Churchill gave birth to a third girl, Marigold. But in , shortly after the deaths of both Clementine's brother and Winston's mother, Marigold contracted septicaemia whilst on a seaside holiday with the childrens' governess.
When she died Winston was grief-stricken and, as his last private secretary recently disclosed in an autobiography, Clementine screamed like an animal undergoing torture. The following September the Churchills' fifth and last child, Mary, was born.
Unconvinced that the Conservative Party was committed to social justice, Churchill switched to the Liberal Party in He was elected a member of Parliament in and was appointed to the prime minister's cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. He introduced several reforms for the prison system, introduced the first minimum wage and helped set up labor exchanges and unemployment insurance. Churchill also assisted in the passing of the People's Budget, which introduced taxes on the wealthy to pay for new social welfare programs.
The budget passed in the House of Commons in and was initially defeated in the House of Lords before being passed in In January , Churchill showed his tougher side when he made a controversial visit to a police siege in London, with two alleged robbers holed up in a building.
Churchill's degree of participation is still in some dispute: Some accounts have him going to the scene only to see for himself what was going on; others state that he allegedly gave directions to police on how to best storm the building. What is known is that the house caught fire during the siege and Churchill prevented the fire brigade from extinguishing the flames, stating that he thought it better to "let the house burn down," rather than risk lives rescuing the occupants.
The bodies of the two robbers were later found inside the charred ruins. The couple had five children together: Diana, Randolph, Sarah, Marigold who died as a toddler of tonsillitis and Mary. Named First Lord of the Admiralty in , Churchill helped modernize the British Navy, ordering that new warships be built with oil-fired instead of coal-fired engines. He was one of the first to promote military aircraft and set up the Royal Navy Air Service. He was so enthusiastic about aviation that he took flying lessons himself to understand firsthand its military potential.
Churchill also drafted a controversial piece of legislation to amend the Mental Deficiency Act of , mandating sterilization of the feeble-minded. The bill, which mandated only the remedy of confinement in institutions, eventually passed in both houses of Parliament. Churchill remained in his post as First Lord of the Admiralty through the start of World War I , but was forced out for his part in the disastrous Battle of Gallipoli.
He resigned from the government toward the end of For a brief period, Churchill rejoined the British Army, commanding a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front and seeing action in "no man's land.
In , he was appointed minister of munitions for the final year of the war, overseeing the production of tanks, airplanes and munitions.
From to , Churchill served as minister of war and air and colonial secretary under Prime Minister David Lloyd George. As colonial secretary, Churchill was embroiled in another controversy when he ordered air power to be used on rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq, a British territory. At one point, he suggested that poisonous gas be used to put down the rebellion, a proposal that was considered but never enacted.
Fractures in the Liberal Party led to the defeat of Churchill as a member of Parliament in , and he rejoined the Conservative Party. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, returning Britain to the gold standard, and took a hard line against a general labor strike that threatened to cripple the British economy. With the defeat of the Conservative government in , Churchill was out of government. He was perceived as a right-wing extremist, out of touch with the people.
In the s, after his ouster from government, Churchill took up painting. Churchill went on to create over paintings, typically working en plein air , though also practicing with still lifes and portraits. He claimed that painting helped him with his powers of observation and memory. After a brief but eventful career in the army, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament in He held many high posts in Liberal and Conservative governments during the first three decades of the century.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty — a post which he had earlier held from to He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of and resigned in However, he remained a Member of Parliament until the general election of , when he did not seek re-election.
UK, remember your settings and improve government services. We also use cookies set by other sites to help us deliver content from their services. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Winston Churchill was an inspirational statesman, writer, orator and leader who led Britain to victory in the Second World War. He served as Conservative Prime Minister twice - from to before being defeated in the general election by the Labour leader Clement Attlee and from to Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in for his many published works.
More information including archive footage can be found at the Churchill War Rooms. Winston Churchill was born on 30 November , in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire and was of rich, aristocratic ancestry.
0コメント