# Churchill  ## Metadata - Author: [[Andrew Roberts]] - Full Title: Churchill - Category: #winston-churchill ## Highlights - ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. ([Location 11393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=11393)) - Despite the litany of errors, there were some consolations from the Norway campaign. Whereas the Royal Navy had lost an aircraft carrier, two cruisers, a sloop and nine destroyers, Germany had lost three cruisers, and ten of her twenty-two destroyers and her only two operational battleships were damaged, much greater losses proportionately to the size of her navy than Britain’s.181 An intact German Navy fighting off Dunkirk the following month could have been a decisive force, but in early May the Germans had only one large cruiser, two light cruisers and seven destroyers ready for immediate service, not enough even to come out of port. ([Location 11918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=11918)) - ‘The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ ([Location 14011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=14011)) - This went to the heart of what he felt the British Empire was about – the protection of the poorest from the rapacity of their own countrymen ([Location 15089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=15089)) - If Britons felt disinclined to go along with the Mahatma’s proposal, they may have recognized that it was at least consistent with his earlier suggestions to Ethiopians to ‘allow themselves to be slaughtered’ by the Italians, since, ‘after all, Mussolini didn’t want a desert’, and his proposition to German Jews after the Kristallnacht atrocity that if they would only adopt his philosophy of non-violent action ‘what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah’, as that would convert the SS ‘to an appreciation of human dignity’.80 In May 1940 Gandhi told a friend, ‘I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.’81 In his last letter to Hitler, on December 1941, Gandhi praised the Führer’s ‘bravery [and] devotion to your Fatherland . . . Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.’82 Gandhi was fortunate that it was the Viceroy who ruled India rather than Hitler; the Führer’s advice to Lord Halifax when they met at Berchtesgaden in 1937 had been ‘Shoot Gandhi.’ ([Location 17228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=17228)) - Churchill said, to Stalin’s vast amusement, ‘In wartime, Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’66 ([Location 19237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19237)) - As Sarah tucked Churchill into his mosquito net that night, she found him giggling to himself and asked why. ‘The President of Turkey kissed me – twice,’ he told her. ‘The trouble with me is that I’m irresistible.’ ([Location 19273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19273)) - Churchill told Roosevelt on 11 February that peace overtures coming from the Bulgarian Government should not lighten the bombing of that country; indeed, ‘If the medicine has done good, let them have more of it.’ ([Location 19395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19395)) - ‘Far more important than India or the Colonies or solvency is the Air. We live in a world of wolves – and bears.’118 He meant that only air superiority could fend off the coming Russian threat – this was exactly two years and one day before he made his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. ([Location 19419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19419)) - To Churchill’s surprise, on 28 March the Government was defeated by one vote – 117 to 116 – on Clause 82 of Butler’s Education Bill, relating to equal pay for male and female teachers. ‘If only the Chancellor of the Exchequer could have been induced to break into a gentle trot,’ Churchill remarked teasingly of Anderson, who had missed the vote, ‘the Government would have been saved.’ ([Location 19485](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19485)) - Marian Holmes enjoyed Churchill’s caustic remarks about people, recording that in early April he referred to one general as ‘a bladder with a name on it’. ([Location 19514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19514)) - De Gaulle feared that Anglo-American military preponderance in France over the coming weeks and months would somehow impinge upon French independence. ([Location 19611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19611)) - When an MP asked him on 8 June to ensure that the same mistakes over reparations were not made after victory that had been made after the Great War, the Prime Minister assured him that ‘That is most fully in our minds. I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated. We shall probably make another set of mistakes.’ ([Location 19686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19686)) - When on 15 June a Tory MP criticized Churchill for visiting the front, suggesting that it was self-indulgent and dangerous, Bracken rounded on him in the Commons, and at the end of a witty and impassioned speech said, ‘Neither the honourable and gallant Member nor anyone else can persuade the Prime Minister to wrap himself in cotton wool. He is the enemy of flocculence in thought, word or deed. Most humbly do I aver that, in years to come, a grateful and affectionate people will say that Winston Churchill was raised to leadership by destiny. Men of destiny have never counted risks.’16 ([Location 19709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19709)) - ‘For purely political considerations here, I could never survive even a slight setback to “Overlord” if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.’35 ‘He was definitely annoyed at FDR’s reply,’ the King noted, ‘and put out that all our well thought-out plans had been ignored by him and his Chiefs of Staff.’ ([Location 19791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19791)) - ‘There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,’ Churchill wrote to Eden on 11 July 1944, long before the death camps were liberated the following January and February, ‘and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races in Europe. ([Location 19828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19828)) - ‘Unfortunately AE is immovable on the subject of Palestine,’ Anthony Eden’s private secretary Oliver Harvey wrote in his diary in April 1943, for example. ‘He loves Arabs and hates Jews.’50 ([Location 19837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19837)) - Many military historians today support Churchill’s drunken arguments over Brooke’s sober ones. But Brooke was right in his regular complaint that Churchill constantly criticized senior officers. ([Location 19861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19861)) - Churchill has been criticized for showing no interest in contacting anti-Hitler elements in Germany during the war, but any attempt by British intelligence to approach political or military opposition elements in Germany would have aroused Stalin’s suspicions that the Western Allies were planning to make a separate peace. ([Location 19872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19872)) - ‘When Herr Hitler escaped his bomb on July 20th, he described his survival as providential,’ Churchill told the Commons with high irony in September. ‘I think that from a purely military point of view we can all agree with him, for certainly it would be most unfortunate if the Allies were to be deprived, in the closing phases of the struggle, of that form of warlike genius by which Corporal Schicklgruber* has so notably contributed to our victory.’59 ([Location 19875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19875)) - Nothing could alter the central fact that Stalin was now in a commanding position in relation to eastern Europe. The success of Operation Bagration in July, in which the Red Army killed, wounded or captured 510,000 German troops of Army Group Centre in Belorussia, dwarfed even what had happened after D-Day. ([Location 19896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19896)) - ‘It is the Russian armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the Germany army,’ Churchill readily acknowledged to the House of Commons on 2 August. ([Location 19898](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19898)) - Where words are useless, silence is best.’ ([Location 19911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19911)) - Although personal relations between Churchill and the Yugoslavian dictator were good, in the event Tito carried out a delicate balancing act between the West and the USSR after victory had been won, playing each off against the other until his death in 1980. ([Location 19928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=19928)) - Churchill’s message was clear, and was not disputed by a good-natured and emollient Roosevelt: whereas the United States was providing the lion’s share of the men and materiel today, in 1940–41 Britain (and by implication Canada) had provided the equally crucial factor of time. ([Location 20022](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20022)) - Churchill tried to warn Roosevelt about ‘the rapid encroachment of the Russians into the Balkans and the consequent dangerous spread of Russian influence in the area’, but the Americans scotched his plan to put an army into Istria as a staging-post into the Balkans by refusing the necessary landing craft, which they said were needed elsewhere. ([Location 20045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20045)) - For anyone who thought Montgomery had botched it – which he had – Churchill added, ‘We must not forget that we owe a great debt to the blunders – the extraordinary blunders – of the Germans. I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connect him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher. But there is one respect in which I must draw a parallel. Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high-water mark of their hectic fortunes had carried them.’114 He then gave several examples of Napoleon’s strategy in 1813–14, likening it to the way that ‘Hitler had successfully scattered the German armies all over Europe, and by obstination at every point from Stalingrad and Tunis down to the present moment, he has stripped himself of the power to concentrate in main strength for the final struggle.’ ([Location 20117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20117)) - The next day, Churchill spoke to a vast crowd at the Hôtel de Ville. ‘I am going to give you a warning; be on your guard,’ he started, ‘because I am going to speak, or try to speak, in French, a formidable undertaking and one which will put great demands on your friendship for Great Britain.’ ([Location 20261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20261)) - One telegram from Roosevelt over future civil aviation rights seemed to be accompanied by a threat of what Colville described as ‘pure blackmail’ as it was linked to continued Lend-Lease supplies. Gil Winant was so embarrassed by it that he didn’t want to stay for lunch at Chequers, but Churchill cheerily insisted that ‘even a declaration of war should not prevent them having a good lunch.’ ([Location 20294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20294)) - It was an integral part of Churchill’s leadership code never to scapegoat subordinates. ([Location 20318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20318)) - ‘What is now clear’, wrote Leslie Rowan a quarter of a century later, ‘is that Greece would not have been a free country had it not been for Churchill’s courage and grasp of the essential.’ ([Location 20393](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20393)) - Churchill received an extraordinary amount of abuse in both Britain and America for supporting monarchists, clerics and ‘reactionaries’ over Communists and ‘progressives’. H. G. Wells put his Other Club comradeship to one side and publicly denounced Churchill as a ‘would-be British Führer’, one of the stupider remarks of an otherwise highly intelligent man.179* On New Year’s Day 1945, The Times attacked the Government’s Greek policy. Churchill composed a crushing letter to the paper, but, as so often, decided not to send it. A year later, he was nonetheless able to tell Clementine, quoting Zechariah, ‘All the cabinets of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe are in Soviet control, excepting only Athens. This brand I snatched from the burning on Christmas Day.’180* ([Location 20395](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20395)) - When Roosevelt said he could only spend five or six days there, Churchill told Colville he was ‘disgusted’. He wrote to Roosevelt, ‘I do not see any . . . way of realizing our hopes about World Organization in five or six days. Even the Almighty took seven.’ ([Location 20411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20411)) - On 24 January 1945, Churchill told Colville that it was half a century since his father’s death. Colville wondered what Lord Randolph, his son Winston and his grandson Randolph all had in common, and decided it was their undeniable ‘capacity for being utterly unreasonable’. ([Location 20446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20446)) - At one point, Sarah counted three field marshals queuing for one bucket. With omnipresent flies and midges, Churchill called Yalta ‘the Riviera of Hades’.15 None of that was mentioned when Stalin called on him on the afternoon of 4 February, however. ‘He is greyer than I thought,’ noted Valentine Lawford, ‘and doesn’t look into the eyes of those he is speaking to.’ ([Location 20515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20515)) - The popular conception that Churchill and Roosevelt simply fell into a series of traps laid by Stalin, believed his lies and naively allowed him to get everything he wanted at Yalta is a myth. There were American officials in Roosevelt’s entourage who were working for the Soviets, namely Alger Hiss of the US State Department and Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White, but little indication that they significantly affected what was agreed. What happened there was much more complicated and subtle, with every part of the Agreement affecting every other. The central, ever-present fact lying behind everything was that Stalin had an army of more than six million men in eastern Europe, including by then in every region of Poland. The Western Allies thought they needed Russia to declare war against Japan once the German war was over, as they could not be certain that the atomic bomb – which for obvious reasons was not mentioned – actually worked. ([Location 20528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20528)) - Churchill and Roosevelt wanted the Russians to engage meaningfully in the work of the United Nations, which was intended as a global organization that would fulfil the Atlantic Charter’s promise of ‘the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security’. Churchill promoted the concept of a Security Council where the Great Powers would ultimately be in control. ([Location 20535](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20535)) - Accusations such as those made by Lawford that Roosevelt was ‘a bit gaga and failing’ were wide of the mark; his intellectual faculties were as powerful as ever; it was just his poor, pain-wracked body that was giving up. ([Location 20541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20541)) - When the royal chamberlain told him that smoking and drinking were banned in the King’s presence owing to the Koran, Churchill replied that ‘my religion prescribed as an absolute sacred ritual smoking cigars and drinking alcohol before, after, and if need be during, all meals and the intervals between them.’48 All he noted of the chamberlain’s response was ‘Complete surrender.’ ([Location 20645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20645)) - ‘The P.M. was rather depressed,’ Colville recorded that weekend at Chequers, ‘thinking of the possibilities of Russia one day turning against us, saying that Chamberlain had trusted Hitler as he was now trusting Stalin (though he thought in different circumstances).’ ([Location 20668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20668)) - When he reached the Siegfried Line, the German defensive fortifications also known as the West Wall, he halted his column of more than twenty cars and jeeps, got out and told the press photographers, ‘This is one of the operations connected with this great war which must not be reproduced graphically.’65 He then turned his back and urinated on Hitler’s defences. ‘I shall never forget the childish grin of intense satisfaction that spread all over his face as he looked down at the critical moment!’ Brooke wrote. On that trip, Churchill also chalked the words ‘Hitler, Personally’ on a shell which was loaded into a gun whose lanyard he pulled to fire. ([Location 20703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20703)) - Churchill visited the front again, this time to watch Operation Plunder, Montgomery’s crossing of the Rhine near Wesel. When Colville returned to Montgomery’s tactical headquarters with blood on his tunic after an 88mm shell landed 10 yards away and cut his jeep driver’s artery, Montgomery criticized him for having gone up too close, but Churchill told his private secretary, ‘I am jealous. You succeeded where I failed. Tomorrow nothing shall stop me.’ Then he ended, poetically, ‘Sleep soundly; you might have slept more soundly still.’ ([Location 20710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20710)) - Part of Churchill’s admiration for Nelson was for his glorious death at the moment of victory. ([Location 20721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20721)) - After almost six years of trying to bomb, crush and starve those same people, that might be considered hypocritical, but pity for the underdog was an instinctive part of his nature. ([Location 20726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20726)) - he learned that fourteen Polish leaders representing non-Communist political parties, including the heroic General Kazimierz Okulicki, one of the former commanders of the Home Army, had been arrested by the Red Army near Warsaw, despite written guarantees of safe conduct. After weeks of silence it transpired that they were going to be put on trial in Moscow.73 If there was any one moment when Churchill was forced to recognize that Stalin had simply been lying to him at Yalta, and there was likely to be a rift with Russia after the German surrender, it was then. ([Location 20737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20737)) - A flash of resentment against the United States was evident in early April, when the State Department suggested that the Soviets be consulted over the rearming of Greece, prompting Churchill to note, ‘This is the usual way in which the State Department, without taking the least responsibility for the outcome, makes comments of an entirely unhelpful character in a spirit of complete detachment.’82 ([Location 20767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20767)) - Diplomatic relations with Russia deteriorated still further when Stalin accused the British and Americans of conducting secret negotiations with the Germans at Berne in Switzerland, when in fact all Alexander had done was to inform Kesselring of how to go about surrendering unconditionally.84 Stalin’s distrust and paranoia were obvious. Roosevelt’s tough response to Stalin on 4 April – ‘Frankly I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment towards your informants . . . for such vile misrepresentations of my actions’ – explodes the myth that he was weak towards the Soviet Union in the last months of his life.85 Churchill was delighted, but also acutely conscious of the United States’ preponderance now in world affairs. ‘Undoubtedly I feel much pain when I see our armies so much smaller than theirs,’ he told Clementine. ‘It has always been my wish to keep equal, but how can you do that against so mighty a nation and a population nearly three times your own?’ ([Location 20779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20779)) - All the disagreements he had had with the President over the years were legitimate ones over strategy and policy, but their personal friendship was on a higher plane, and at key moments in the war – the quarter-million rifles in 1940, the mid-Atlantic patrols, the fifty destroyers, Lend-Lease, the post-Tobruk Sherman tanks, postponing Operation Roundup and championing Operation Torch, the Mediterranean strategy, among many others – Roosevelt had helped Britain enormously. ‘He was a great friend to us,’ Churchill told Walter Thompson. ‘He gave us immeasurable help at a time when we most needed it.’ ([Location 20812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20812)) - Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names. I date this minute from St George’s Day.’ ([Location 20854](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20854)) - Churchill asked Clementine to ‘express to Stalin personally my cordial feelings and my resolve and confidence that a complete understanding between the English-speaking world and Russia will be achieved and maintained for many years, as this is the only hope of the world.’108 When she presented Stalin with a gold fountain pen as a gift from Churchill, he ungraciously replied, ‘I only write with a pencil.’ ([Location 20874](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20874)) - ‘An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,’ Churchill wrote to Truman of the Soviets on 12 May, in his first use of that phrase. ([Location 20987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20987)) - Churchill did not invent the term Iron Curtain, which had been around since 1918 and had appeared in a book Philip Snowden’s wife Dame Ethel Snowden wrote about Bolshevism in 1920, but he stored the evocative phrase away in his extraordinarily capacious memory for a quarter of a century, before deploying it to maximum effect in 1946. ([Location 20992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20992)) - Churchill ordered the authors of the report (but not the Services ministry staff, as it was considered too sensitive) to compile a memorandum on what it thought might happen if the British Empire, the United States and the Polish and German armies had to go to war against a Russo-Japanese alliance in July 1945, in order to impose upon Russia ‘a square deal for Poland’. ([Location 20999](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=20999)) - The whole scenario – aptly codenamed Operation Unthinkable – was analysed in a detailed report on 8 June, complete with annexes including maps and opposing force sizes. It pointed out that the Russians outnumbered the Western Allies by three to one in Europe, and then examined the effect of war there, and in the Middle East, India and the Far East. The study concluded that it would be a ‘long and costly’ war, in which it was ‘extremely doubtful whether we could achieve a limited and quick success’.137 The Operation Unthinkable documents do not imply that Churchill was an inveterate anti-Communist warmonger, but show that he was preparing for every eventuality, however unlikely or unwelcome. They also underline how important it was for the West that the atomic bomb should actually work. ([Location 21003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21003)) - Many historians today believe that the Gestapo remark made little difference to the outcome of the election, and that most Britons were perfectly capable of differentiating between Churchill the great wartime Prime Minister whom they mobbed at election meetings up and down the country, and Churchill the Tory Party leader against whom they voted with perfect equanimity. ([Location 21054](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21054)) - Before Churchill left, he asked Truman to telegraph him the results of the plutonium atomic tests at Alamogordo in New Mexico: ‘Let me know whether it is a flop or a plop.’154 He had already given his consent to the Americans to use the atomic bomb against Japan if the tests proved successful. The following May he discussed the morality of the decision with William Mackenzie King, telling him ‘that he would have to account to God as he had to his own conscience for the decision made which involved killing women and children and in such numbers’.155 He pointed out that without the Bomb the war could have gone on another year, leading to even greater numbers being killed, and with ‘a breaking down of civilization bit by bit’. In what he said was ‘a universe governed by moral laws of justice and right’, he believed he ‘had done what was right’. ([Location 21084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21084)) - In his war memoirs, Churchill wrote of how he ‘went down to the bottom and saw the room in which he and his mistress* had committed suicide, and when we came up again they showed us the place where his body had been burned’.157 He had finally tracked the beast to its lair. ([Location 21097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21097)) - As the Potsdam Conference opened, Truman was able to tell Stalin officially about the existence of the Bomb. Stalin showed the requisite amount of surprise, not revealing that his spies had kept him fully informed and that he was already trying to build his own. ([Location 21105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21105)) - When Moran later spoke of the people’s ingratitude, Churchill replied, ‘Oh, no. I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.’168 He was however shocked that the Independent who stood against him in Woodford had received 10,488 votes, even though he himself had won 27,688. ([Location 21138](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21138)) - He attributed his defeat to the people’s reaction to their sufferings of the past five years – they have endured all the horrors and discomforts of war, and, automatically, they have vented it on the government that has been in power throughout the period of their discomfort.’ ([Location 21145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21145)) - Churchill refused the King’s third offer of the Order of the Garter, supposedly saying afterwards, ‘Why should I accept the Order of the Garter from His Majesty when the people have just given me the order of the boot?’ ([Location 21154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21154)) - In the Chequers visitors’ book, at the bottom of the page for 30 July 1945, are the signatures ‘Clementine S. Churchill’ and ‘Winston S. Churchill’. Below, in Churchill’s handwriting, is the single word ‘Finis’. ([Location 21174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21174)) - Churchill once asked his actress daughter Sarah, ‘Do you mind when a show breaks up?’ ‘Oh yes, terribly,’ she replied. ‘So do I,’ he said.3 ([Location 21183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21183)) - Many monuments were proposed to him after the war, and £50,000 was even raised for a 200-foot carving of his face in the White Cliffs of Dover, complete with a large cigar with a permanently lit end in red, for the safety of shipping. ([Location 21189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21189)) - There were other advantages to being out of office. Churchill could not have warned of the threat of Soviet Communism if he had also had to deal diplomatically with the USSR from day to day. Leaving No. 10 also allowed him to put his money worries behind him for the first time in his life. He would write The Second World War, his six volumes of memoirs comprising over 4,200 pages, for enormous advances, something he could never have had time to do as prime minister. ([Location 21206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21206)) - The 1945 electoral defeat therefore fitted into a grand historical theme of successful heroic endeavour followed by expulsion from power by an ungrateful people. ([Location 21217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21217)) - On 6 August 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan, killing over 100,000 people. ‘The revelations of the secrets of nature, long mercifully withheld from Man,’ read the Attlee Government’s statement, drafted by Churchill before his defeat, ‘should arouse the most solemn reflections in the mind and conscience of every human being capable of comprehension. We must indeed pray that these awful agencies will be made to conduce to peace among the nations and that instead of wreaking measureless havoc upon the entire globe they may become a perennial fountain of world prosperity.’16 Three days later, another Bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing more than 40,000 people and forcing Japan to surrender. Churchill told the Commons that the only alternative was to have ‘sacrificed a million American, and a quarter of a million British, lives’.17 ([Location 21241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21241)) - He also used the phrase ‘iron curtain’ for the first time in public, about the expulsion of millions of Germans from the new Poland: ‘It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.’ ([Location 21265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21265)) - Churchill was so relaxed in Italy that he even gave up his afternoon naps – as it turned out, for ever. ([Location 21288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21288)) - Churchill kept up a constant fire against socialism and the Labour Party in Parliament, mocking the Government’s rationing regime as a ‘Queuetopia’. ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ he said in a debate in October. ‘The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.’ ([Location 21293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21293)) - When the Labour former Cabinet minister Wilfred Paling shouted, ‘Dirty dog!’ at Churchill, he received the reply, ‘The right honourable Member should remember what dirty dogs do to palings.’ ([Location 21301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21301)) - Churchill’s most celebrated witticism – especially as he (sadly) never made the remark about drinking Lady Astor’s poisoned coffee were he her husband – was delivered when the Labour MP Bessie Braddock told him in 1946, ‘Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more you’re disgustingly drunk,’ and he had replied, ‘Bessie my dear, you are ugly, and what’s more you’re disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.’ ([Location 21307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21307)) - one of sixteen such academic honours bestowed on him by universities around the world between 1926 and 1954. ‘I am surprised that in my later life I should have become so experienced in taking degrees, when, as a school-boy, I was so bad at passing examinations,’ he said at Miami. ‘In fact one might almost say that no one ever passed so few examinations and received so many degrees.’ ([Location 21320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21320)) - The central messages of his speech were that ‘No boy or girl should ever be disheartened by lack of success in their youth, but should diligently and faithfully continue to persevere and make up for lost time,’ and that ‘Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story, with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope.’ ([Location 21323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21323)) - Churchill told Clark Clifford, one of Truman’s aides, that ‘There is one country where a man knows he has an unbounded future: the U.S.A., even though I deplore some of your customs . . . You stop drinking with your meals.’ ([Location 21329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21329)) - Truman read the speech, and said he had no criticism or alteration to make. Instead, he said, ‘Clement Attlee came to see me the other day. He struck me as a very modest man.’ ‘He has much to be modest about,’ retorted Churchill. ([Location 21337](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21337)) - in private Churchill usually deprecated criticism of Attlee, who had been instrumental in removing Chamberlain, and who had served so patriotically under him for so long. Indeed, when Freddie Birkenhead asked Churchill in March 1946 which of his former Labour colleagues he respected the most, fully expecting Churchill to say Bevin, ‘Rather to my surprise, he unhesitatingly said “Attlee”.’ ([Location 21340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21340)) - Churchill said that war was not imminent and that the Soviets did not want war, but ‘What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.’ The dangers would not be removed by appeasing Russia, he argued. ‘From what I have seen of our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.’ ([Location 21373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21373)) - Even today, revisionist historians still sometimes blame Churchill for launching the Cold War with the Iron Curtain speech, rather than pointing out that there was already one being fought, which the West was losing. Ernest Bevin, now foreign secretary, and Thomas Dewey, who was to become the Republican candidate for the presidency, were two of the very few not to repudiate Churchill, since they had reached much the same conclusions about Stalin’s motives themselves. ([Location 21389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21389)) - In May, on receiving the Freedom of Westminster, Churchill had repeated his view from the 1930s that ‘India is a continent as large as and more populous than Europe, and not less deeply divided by racial and religious differences than Europe. India has no more unity than Europe, except that superficial unity which has been created by our rule and guidance in the last hundred and fifty years.’59 On 1 August he gave a public warning that Indian independence, to which the Labour Party was committed, would result in large loss of life, most probably in the north-western part of the sub-continent. ([Location 21418](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21418)) - The massive population transfers that took place as Britain handed over power to the successor states of India and Pakistan in August 1947 had led to the massacre of enormous numbers of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province. He blamed the Labour Government. ‘Indian unity created by British rule will swiftly perish,’ he said, ‘and no one can measure the misery and bloodshed which will overtake these enormous masses of humble helpless millions, or under what new power their future and destiny will lie. ([Location 21438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21438)) - In his peroration, he as usual made it perfectly clear – as he always did whenever he spoke in public or private on the subject – that he did not intend Britain to join the United Europe herself: ‘In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and I trust Soviet Russia, for then indeed all would be well, must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine.’ ([Location 21460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21460)) - He intended Britain to be, as he put it, a friend and sponsor and ‘profoundly blended’ with a United Europe, though not an integral part of it. ([Location 21468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21468)) - Churchill turned a summerhouse at Chartwell into a butterfly house soon after the war, stocking it with the larvae of Red Admiral, Peacock, Tortoise Shell, Clouded Yellow, Painted Lady and Vanessa butterflies. He would sit in it for hours and watch them emerge from their chrysalises, whereupon he enjoyed releasing them. ‘There was a great resurgence of the butterfly population in that part of Kent,’ recorded the lepidopterist Hugh Newman, ‘thanks to Mr Churchill.’ ([Location 21496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21496)) - Churchill’s own monument was not going to be made ‘by piling great stones on one another’, as he put it, but by these war memoirs. ([Location 21688](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21688)) - A few years after the victory at Hurst Park, when it was suggested that Colonist II be put out to stud, he remarked, ‘And have it said that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is living off the immoral earnings of a horse?’ ([Location 21758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21758)) - Forty years before it happened in Europe, Churchill predicted the demise of Communism: Laws just or unjust may govern men’s actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where, and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life. Peoples in bondage need never despair. ([Location 21788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21788)) - On being told by a Party worker that voting intentions in the Hammersmith South by-election that February were ‘higgledy-piggledy’, Churchill asked, ‘What do you mean? How much higgledy, and how much piggledy?’ ([Location 21802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21802)) - The quips kept coming on his seventy-fifth birthday party at Hyde Park Gate later that month; when the photographer expressed his hope that he would also shoot his hundredth birthday party, ‘I don’t see why not, young man,’ Churchill replied. ‘You look reasonably fit and healthy.’ ([Location 21823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21823)) - Asked if he feared death, he said, ‘I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.’ ([Location 21825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21825)) - Churchill and his party had a formidable hill to climb. The 1945–50 Parliament had passed no fewer than 347 Acts of Parliament, had implemented the Beveridge Report in full with the National Insurance Act of 1946 and the National Assistance Act of 1948, created the National Health Service, built over a million new houses, and raised the school-leaving age to fifteen. Labour had also nationalized the coalmines, the railways, gas, electricity, road haulage and the Bank of England. It had given India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma their independence, withdrawn from Palestine and helped found NATO. Many of these were genuine achievements, but the cost had been shortages, rationing, austerity, high taxation, Party splits, the devaluation of sterling and an utterly exhausted Cabinet: both Bevin and Cripps were to be dead within two years. ([Location 21852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21852)) - In late June 1950, Stalin encouraged the North Korean Communist leader Kim Il-Sung to invade South Korea, in order to test Western willpower. ([Location 21899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21899)) - The death of the eighty-year-old Field Marshal Jan Smuts on 11 September led Churchill to continue his tradition of speaking about himself in his friends’ eulogies, telling the Other Club that Smuts had been ‘our greatest living member’. ([Location 21904](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21904)) - the Second World War had cost Britain almost one-third of her net wealth ([Location 21944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=21944)) - ‘I have always considered that the substitution of the internal combustion engine for the horse marked a very gloomy milestone in the progress of mankind.’ ([Location 22037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22037)) - Churchill had already abandoned the wartime practices of afternoon naps and late-night reading of the first editions of the next day’s papers, but he smoked just as many cigars and, in Colville’s recollection, ‘although he was never inebriated (or, indeed, drank between meals anything but soda-water flavoured with whisky), he would still consume, without the smallest ill-effect, enough champagne and brandy at luncheon or dinner to incapacitate any lesser man’.22 ‘When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch,’ Churchill told the King in January 1952. ‘It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.’ ([Location 22077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22077)) - Churchill took a train to Ottawa, where Colville had written a speech for him to deliver to both Houses of the Canadian Parliament. ‘I may feel bound to use it,’ Churchill told him, ‘in which case it will be the first time in my career I have ever used somebody else’s speech.’35 In the end, he wrote his own. ([Location 22137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22137)) - Churchill pointed out that there was no atomic implication to the words ‘prompt, resolute and effective’, and ‘Certainly, if one is dealing in general terms, they are better than “tardy, timid and fatuous”.’39 ([Location 22151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22151)) - At a party at No. 10 later that month for Ismay, who was about to take up the post of secretary-general of NATO, Ismay said in his speech that he regretted leaving behind his herd of Jersey cows in Gloucestershire. ‘Quite easy,’ heckled Churchill. ‘Milk the cows in the morning, fly to Paris, and milk the Americans in the afternoon!’ ([Location 22202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22202)) - On the question of whether the Army should adopt Belgian, British or American automatic rifles, Sir William Slim said, ‘I suppose we shall end up with some mongrel weapon, half-British and half-American.’ ‘Pray moderate your language, Field Marshal,’ said Churchill. ‘That’s an exact description of me.’ ([Location 22206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22206)) - Churchill’s final acceptance of the Order of the Garter in April 1953 allowed him to look magnificent in its mantle (which he wore over his uniform as lord warden of the Cinque Ports) at the Coronation two months later. He now became ‘Sir Winston’, and was able to joke, ‘Now Clemmie will have to be a lady at last.’ ([Location 22372](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22372)) - Although emotionally Churchill liked the idea of a gallant and handsome Battle of Britain fighter pilot marrying a beautiful princess, once it was pointed out to him by Lascelles at Chartwell that some Commonwealth countries might not accept the child of a divorcee as their future monarch, he decided that Princess Margaret must renounce her right to the throne in order to marry Townsend.94 The main thing, he emphasized, was to give the least possible pain and anxiety to the Queen. The relationship ended, and Princess Margaret blamed Lascelles for ruining her life. In fact it had been Churchill, in consultation with Lord Salisbury and Rab Butler, but not with the divorcee Eden, who was still in Boston. ([Location 22387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22387)) - Churchill saying on 2 July that he did ‘not believe in another world; only in black velvet – eternal sleep’. ([Location 22446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22446)) - Despite the Korean War ending, at least with an armistice, Churchill still had a low estimation of the Eisenhower Administration, and regretted Adlai Stevenson’s defeat the previous year. ([Location 22455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22455)) - Churchill has been much criticized for this intervention in Iranian domestic politics, but it kept that country firmly in the Western camp for over a quarter of a century, beyond which no statesman can be expected to foresee. ([Location 22469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22469)) - On 15 October Churchill learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. ‘Is that you, Anthony?’ he telephoned Eden in Paris. ‘How are you? I thought you would like to know that I have just been awarded a Nobel Prize.’ Then, after a pause and a chuckle, he added, ‘But don’t worry, dear, it’s for Literature, not for Peace.’ ([Location 22482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22482)) - Churchill and Montgomery had listed five ‘capital mistakes’ that they believed the Americans had made in the war, most of which had been Eisenhower’s. ([Location 22498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22498)) - Churchill and Eisenhower had earlier discussed what would happen if North Korea broke the armistice which had been signed on 27 July, and which had brought the fighting to an end without a peace treaty. When the Americans announced their inclination to use the atomic bomb if the Chinese supported the North Koreans again, Churchill and Eden were strongly opposed now that the Western powers no longer had an atomic monopoly. ([Location 22515](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22515)) - On 26 June, Churchill told congressional leaders, ‘Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war’ (which was later paraphrased as ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’). ([Location 22555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22555)) - Churchill privately said of Dulles, ‘He is the only case of a bull I know who carries his china closet with him.’145 (He later also made the declension, ‘Dull, duller, Dulles.’) ([Location 22559](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22559)) - ‘I could have defended the British Empire against anyone,’ he told an aide later on, ‘except the British people.’147 He had kept his promise of 1942 not to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, with no part of it becoming independent during his time as prime minister, but the year after he left office Sudan gained its independence, and then Ghana and Malaya (modern-day Malaysia) in 1957, and Kenya in 1964. ([Location 22567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22567)) - Churchill joked to the sculptor Oscar Nemon about his would-be successor. ‘I really should resign. One cannot expect Anthony to live forever.’ ([Location 22629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22629)) - The young Tory MP Angus Maude recalled him telling a group of them, for example, that ‘The secret of drinking is to drink a little too much all the time.’ ([Location 22727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22727)) - Churchill enjoyed inviting visitors to Chartwell; on one occasion he offered a whisky and soda to a Mormon, who replied, ‘May I have water, Sir Winston? Lions drink it.’ ‘Asses drink it too,’ came the reply. Another Mormon present said, ‘Strong drink rageth and stingeth like a serpent.’ ‘I have long been looking for a drink like that,’ Churchill retorted. ([Location 22750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22750)) - ‘At times of crisis, myths have their historical importance’ ([Location 22769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22769)) - Roy Howells became his full-time attendant. ‘You were very rude to me, you know,’ Churchill once told him. ‘Yes, but you were rude too,’ Howells replied, whereupon Churchill, ‘with just the hint of a smile’, said, ‘Yes, but I am a great man.’ ([Location 22852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=22852)) - Some 350 million people watched the funeral on television worldwide; indeed the American audience was even larger than for President Kennedy’s funeral fifteen months earlier. ([Location 23012](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23012)) - He was a child of nature. He venerated tradition, but ridiculed convention. General Lord Ismay on Churchill2 ([Location 23037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23037)) - ‘Far too much has been and is being written about me,’ Churchill told Prof Lindemann – and that was in the 1920s. ([Location 23042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23042)) - ‘I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.’ ([Location 23064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23064)) - ‘It does not matter how many mistakes one makes in politics so long as one keeps on making them,’ ([Location 23067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23067)) - ‘It is like throwing babies to the wolves; once you stop, the pack overtakes the sleigh.’ ([Location 23067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23067)) - Yet when it came to all three of the mortal threats posed to Western civilization, by the Prussian militarists in 1914, the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s and Soviet Communism after the Second World War, Churchill’s judgement stood far above that of the people who had sneered at his. ([Location 23072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23072)) - The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that ‘A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.’ ([Location 23081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23081)) - Every one of the eight admirals carrying Horatio Nelson’s coffin in January 1806 had cried quite uninhibitedly. ([Location 23186](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23186)) - ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,’ George Bernard Shaw wrote in ‘The Revolutionist’s Handbook’; ‘the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ ([Location 23397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23397)) - On being attacked by Leslie Hore Belisha over the failings of the A22 tank during the confidence motion in July 1942, he replied, ‘As might be expected, it had many defects and teething troubles, and when these became apparent the tank was appropriately rechristened the “Churchill”.’ ([Location 23423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23423)) - Since the invention of the internet, a revisionist ‘Black Legend’ has attached to Churchill’s name, in which he is held responsible for the sinkings of the Titanic and Lusitania, massacring striking miners in Tonypandy, ordering the bombing and strafing of innocent Irish demonstrators, poison-gassing Iraqi tribesmen, promulgating anti-Semitism, deliberately not saving Coventry from destruction, assassinating Admiral Darlan, General Sikorski and several others, genocidally starving Bengalis during the Famine, and very much more. Mostly these arise from (sometimes wilful) misreadings of the original sources or from taking them wildly out of context, though some are just entirely invented. A return to the original archives and documents, as this book demonstrates, reveals them to be myths, but ones that will always exist in cyberspace. ([Location 23429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23429)) - In a survey of 3,000 British teenagers in 2008, no fewer than 20 per cent of them thought Winston Churchill to be a fictional character.58 (In the same survey, 58 per cent thought Sherlock Holmes and 47 per cent thought Eleanor Rigby were real people.) ([Location 23436](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B079R3VH13&location=23436))