Winston Churchill was a man of many talents. He was a writer, a statesman, a poet, a war hero, and a writer of many books. But was he a bad father? Was he a terrible husband? A bad father-in-law? Did he make mistakes that cost millions of lives? And did he deserve to be remembered for what he achieved in World War II? In this episode, Churchill reflects on his life and considers the possibility that he may not have been as good a father as we think he was. He asks the question, Who is this man? Who is the man I really am? and why did I become the man that I am today? The Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, and The Battle of Dunkirk are two of the most famous films of the war, but they are not the first time that we have seen Winston Churchill's life reflected back to us in a new light. This podcast is not about his childhood, but about his life, and the legacy that he left behind, and how he became the man we know him as a writer and a man that we remember him as today, and what it means to be a hero today, not as a man who lost his father, but as a young man who was a leader, a leader who lost a loved one, a father, a son, a husband, a brother, a friend, a child, a soldier, a grandfather, a great man, a student, a writer... a man... a man lost in the Great War, a hero lost in battle, and lost in his own childhood, and in the end, a man no longer remembered, but remembered as a hero, but still remembered as such, and finally remembered as one of the greatest in history... and remembered as the greatest man in history. I m not the man he really is, but the man who won the war that saved the war he was born to become a hero. . Thank you for listening to this episode of the Winston Churchill podcast, Sir Winston Churchill. I m proud of you, Sir Tom, I m sorry for not being a better than the man you thought you would be... or not the one you thought I was... I m going to be... - Tom, Sir Thomas More, I hope you like it, I know you'll like it. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Tom, and I love you.
Transcript
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00:00:05.000There has been much talk of my life and legacy, and I would be remiss if I were not to volunteer my own, let's say, commiserations.
00:00:16.000Because after a half a century in the grave, it's occurred to me that I may not be the hero I perceive me to be.
00:00:32.000I recently endured The Darkest Hour, a film starring a young man, tiny man, named Gary Oldman.
00:00:46.000You may know him as Sid Vicious, where he was wearing a funny shirt that had a hammer and a sickle on it instead of a Nazi swastika, which I found confusing.
00:00:59.000I mean, it was the communists, it was the Russians that helped us in World War II destroy the Jerrys.
00:01:36.000But, as I observed these two films, I went back over my life, my mother's life, my father's life, and I considered the possibility that I may
00:01:52.000have allowed my own hubris to jeopardize the lives of millions of men.
00:02:00.000Because when one has time to pontificate in the grave, which is difficult to convey to those of the still living, but you're allowed more layers, if you will.
00:02:17.000And within these layers, I researched my life,
00:02:22.000And I saw many more foibles than I had originally discovered through the first draft.
00:02:32.000And one thing I thought when I saw Dunkirk, not just the film obviously, but reliving it every day, it does seem a somewhat
00:04:32.000And I appreciate, in a world of Western self-hatred, in a world of this, not just ethno-masochism, but cultural masochism, where we tend to avoid self-praise, we tend to avoid our victories.
00:04:50.000We blame ourselves for any other suffering that we may have endured.
00:04:54.000And I guess that's what I'm doing now, while I go back over my life!
00:05:36.000I actually come from a long line of great men and warriors who had fought to expand Great Britain's powers across the world and when I was born there was a bit of a lull in our victories in that we would become somewhat sedentary and I desperately
00:05:56.000Wanted to have a similar legacy, a similar victory, and I think that is what affected me as a young man.
00:06:03.000And I bring that up because that relates to World War II.
00:06:10.000I was a difficult boy in school and I was often confrontational.
00:06:16.000I was also unloved as a young man, I think.
00:06:21.000I took to my books as a way to escape.
00:06:28.000And I think I became a writer just out of practice, truly, the spoken word.
00:06:39.000At any rate, the reason that I've chosen to focus, the reason I've chosen to do this podcast is to focus on not World War II, not my childhood, but on the Boer War.
00:06:53.000This happened many years before World War II.
00:07:36.000And it would be a matter of formality, a matter of paperwork.
00:07:40.000We're the greatest empire that had ever been seen.
00:07:48.000We went there as a call of duty, as a matter of fact, and without real consideration of the consequences.
00:07:59.000And, you know, it was in many ways similar to the American Revolution.
00:08:05.000You'd think we would have learned our lesson from 1776, where, you know, the traditional warfare is a formidable force when everyone plays by the same rules.
00:08:18.000Unfortunately, the Boers, they had their own plan.
00:09:21.000You see, the thing about the Boar was he was his own race in many ways, his own ethnicity, a strange combination of Dutch and Scots and British and Irish.
00:09:34.000They had been planning this for some time.
00:09:36.000They'd been fighting the Zulus for many years.
00:09:57.000And much like the American myth is that they came to America and obliterated the Indians, they actually worked with the Indians in many cases.
00:10:04.000And that was the case of the South Africans, at least at the beginning.
00:10:08.000So these men knew the land, they knew the locals, they knew the language, and they knew how to survive.
00:10:20.000The nights were cold in South Africa, the days stiflingly hot.
00:10:25.000I believe you used Fahrenheit, 110, 120 degrees.
00:10:30.000And the other thing unique about the Boers was they had focused their attention on military weapons.
00:10:38.000They had been going back and forth to Germany for many years and buying the latest guns, the latest machine guns, artillery.
00:10:46.000So though we were the most equipped army in the world, these were the most equipped mercenaries in the world.
00:10:52.000And as they hid behind mudslides and rocks and trees in the darkness, set up fake cannons out of tree stumps so we couldn't even see where the anger was coming from, we met incredible pain and suffering, incredible loss.
00:11:18.000It was an armored train we were taking.
00:11:21.000An armored train sounds safe to the common vernacular, but it is a box, an iron box, that was attacked to the degree where we tried to escape.
00:11:37.000I mean, into gunfire, because the bullets were coming through the actual walls
00:11:57.000Subjected to any kind of limitations with your immediate freedom, whether you're in a wood box or a home under house arrest, but it is something that strips a man to his core.
00:12:09.000To be unable to leave is deeply and utterly humiliating, and that is why I have always fought tooth and nail for individual liberty among men.
00:12:28.000I'm not a particularly religious man, but I do believe the most natural state is the most free state.
00:12:35.000And to suffer the indignity of arrest was acutely painful.
00:12:42.000I keep bringing up that word, pain, but I believe that it is what has driven my career my entire life, and it is why
00:12:54.000I have been conjoined to war and inexorably linked to massacre my entire life.
00:13:03.000I believe that pain and I have been allies, and though I never got to marry the love of my life, I do believe that I endured a matrimony with suffering that got to the point where I thoroughly enjoyed
00:13:23.000People, I recall the King of England asking me how I can be drunk or drink a bottle of champagne at lunch and start in the morning with sherry and brandies.
00:14:24.000I climbed a fence, quite simply, ran, and there was so much serendipity on this escape, so many uncanny strokes of sheer luck, that it makes one wonder if the big guy upstairs does sweat the small stuff.
00:15:04.000And as they turned their backs and missed this brief window, I seized the opportunity, jumped over the fence, hid in some bushes for a while.
00:15:14.000I was instantly in someone's backyard when I climbed over the fence.
00:15:19.000And you have to understand, this is during a time of war, extreme animosity against the English.
00:16:05.000And eventually after I was abandoned by the previous intrusions and they returned to their home and the dogs were left, I picked myself up and quite simply strutted out of the backyard
00:18:06.000Word had escaped along with me, following me like a shadow.
00:18:11.000John Howard arrives, I mean I arrive, sorry, at John Howard's home and I make up a ridiculous story about being stranded by my group and I'm facing death because he can tell I'm lying.
00:18:29.000Eventually, I decide to tell the truth and I come clean that I am in fact Winston Churchill, I am an escaped POW, and I assume you're a bore, B-O-E-R by the way, and you're going to kill me.
00:19:57.000And so, John procured a local wool manufacturer named Charles Burnham.
00:20:07.000Mr. Burnham facilitated a train car wherein he built a tiny stowaway sleeping area where I would sit amongst these large crates of wool on a train car.
00:20:22.000And for 16 hours I would go to the border, Portuguese Africa, which was an ally of England, no fan of the Boers.
00:21:37.000In fact, the man leading the war down there decided that he would no longer fight, and he suggested that Queen Victoria, at the time, begin negotiations with the Boers to minimize the damage.
00:22:34.000I was told in World War II, Frank Mars created M&Ms for the soldiers where they could have chocolate and they'd be encased in a shell where it would not melt.
00:23:45.000To conquer the enemy is what leads to victory.
00:23:50.000Or, and this is the possibility I'm facing as a dead man, or what we've discovered is that war is merely a test to see who can be more cruel.
00:24:44.000Not unlike the POW camps of World War II.
00:24:48.000And because it was war, because we were low on supplies, obviously, these emaciated children died in the tens of thousands.
00:25:00.000And the soldiers said, the Boers said, we will fight to the end!
00:25:05.000And the common Boer reply was, is this not the end?
00:25:11.000For what we did to the Boers, what we did to the South Africans was shocking, even to the soldiers, the British soldiers ourselves, they were shocking to me.
00:25:22.000And that's 20,000 Boers, 20,000 South African women and children murdered, essentially, in POW camps.
00:25:30.000But that's also 20,000 additional black Africans and Indians, you know,
00:25:38.000There was a large indigenous population in South Africa, and they also were conscripted to fight in these wars by the Boers, then slaughtered by the English.
00:25:47.000One man who refused to pick up a gun, of course, is Mahatma Gandhi, who went on to be a huge pain in England's ass.
00:25:58.000I must say one thing about Gandhi that was profoundly impressive.
00:26:03.000Was while the battles were at their worst, while the bullets soared through the sky, and it was impossible not to hear them come within inches of your own ears, to see that young Indian man with a gurney
00:26:21.000And stretches and medical supplies run through these bullets, run through these bombs to rescue these people was an absolutely fascinating endeavor.
00:26:30.000And much to behold, Mr. Gandhi was, if anything, he was a brave man.
00:26:37.000I often wonder if his love of guns came from being shot at so much.
00:28:38.000And of course, history is written by the victors, and the victors claim that it was their patriotism, their bravery, and their determination to win that brought them to the forefront.
00:28:52.000That brought them the gold medal in war.
00:29:05.000One of the most chilling possibilities is that I was just determined to prove myself to my father and to my beautiful mother, Jenny, that I was not a pampered sophisticant, but I was a warrior just like John Churchill, just like all my ancestors.
00:29:29.000And it's completely conceivable that that determination, which is nothing more than simple daddy issues with power, these empowered daddy issues led to countless deaths.
00:29:44.000So, while I'm admonished and treated as a hero, while people garner awards for repeating my speeches,
00:29:57.000While films are made and books are written of my incredible exploits, it's entirely possible that the entire thing is false.
00:30:08.000And I am a reckless egomaniac who has driven millions of people to deaths, needless deaths, in the name of irrelevant, ethereal concepts like the Union Jack.
00:30:29.000It's not something that I'm particularly proud of, and I don't think that mainstream Americans are in desperate need of some more self-flagellation, so this is perhaps not the best time to be considering this.
00:30:42.000But it's something that I'm forced to ponder here in this strange... What is it called again?