The Art of Manliness - #544： The Audacious Life of Winston Churchill

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast when we seek an

00:00:11.680 example of great leadership one man who often comes to mind is winston churchill the iconic

00:00:15.880 visionary prime minister who guided his country through war and stood firmly for his beliefs and

00:00:19.960 impervious to his critics but how did winston become the legendary british bulldog my guest

00:00:24.400 today seeks to answer that question in his biography churchill walking with destiny his

00:00:28.180 name is andrew roberts he's a journalist and historian and we begin our conversation discussing

00:00:32.080 why he thought another churchill biography was needed we then shift to the life of churchill

00:00:36.000 beginning with a childhood in which young winston often felt neglected andrew then discusses

00:00:40.360 churchill's military career why winston was so eager to see action on the front lines and how

00:00:44.700 he parlayed those experiences into becoming the world's highest paid journalist by his mid-twenties

00:00:49.280 andrew then explains how churchill also became one of the 20th century's great historians and how his

00:00:53.520 appreciation for history and sentimental outlook colored his worldview and shaped his leadership

00:00:57.420 we also discuss why churchill is one of the few leaders to foresee the threat that hither posed

00:01:01.560 and we end our conversation discussing whether some of the current criticisms of churchill such as

00:01:05.420 the allegation that he masterminded genocide in india really hold weight after the show's over check

00:01:10.060 out our show notes at aom.is slash churchill andrew joins me now by phone

00:01:14.020 okay andrew roberts welcome to the show thank you very much indeed so you have a new biography out

00:01:28.640 about winston churchill churchill walking with destiny now churchill is probably one of the most

00:01:33.580 written about individuals of the 20th century why why do you think the time was right for a new

00:01:38.760 biography about him you're right there are no fewer than 1009 biographies of winston churchill

00:01:44.840 um so it's a uh it's perfectly reasonable to ask why on earth the public needs a new one the answer

00:01:51.920 is that in the last decade there have been an avalanche of new sources on winston churchill that

00:01:57.960 have become available i was the first churchill biographer ever to be allowed to see the queen's

00:02:04.220 father's diaries king george vi met churchill every week of the war on a tuesday at lunchtime

00:02:10.160 and and wrote down everything that the prime minister told them also there have been 41 sets

00:02:16.120 of papers from different people that have been deposited at the churchill archives in cambridge

00:02:23.480 over the last 10 years and they've also been various very important diaries for example ivan

00:02:29.600 my ski the russian ambassador that's been published and uh and other things like that

00:02:34.720 the batum accounts of the war cabinet so all in all actually there is easily enough to write a book

00:02:40.340 like this one does it has something on every page that has appeared in no churchill biography before

00:02:46.860 so new information new insights gives greater context that's right so let's start with about

00:02:52.640 churchill because i think most of us know him as the the scowling bald guy during world war ii

00:02:57.460 but he's his his whole entire life was incredible let's start with his his childhood what was that

00:03:04.160 like and how did that influence the leader that he would become during world war ii well he had a

00:03:09.880 pretty unhappy childhood really his father and mother were very busy people and father was chancellor

00:03:16.040 of the exchequer in the british government and his mother was a hugely popular high society socialite

00:03:23.000 and although they were successful in their own fields they had no time really for their son

00:03:28.940 winston or winston's younger brother jack who as a result were very badly neglected and you can see

00:03:35.760 in their letters the uh the desire for love and attention that really didn't get given to to either of

00:03:42.500 them and in winston's case where his father was actually unpleasant to him actively disdainful and

00:03:48.740 aloof and unpleasant his response was actually the counterintuitive one which was to adore his

00:03:55.180 father worship him and especially after his death in 1895 when churchill was 20 years old and he sought

00:04:01.060 to emulate his his father and it was the major reason for him to go into politics yeah the letters were

00:04:06.700 heartbreaking that he would write when he's at boarding school i think there was one letter his father

00:04:11.000 was just like two miles away and winston was like please come visit me i want to see you and his dad

00:04:16.340 didn't re didn't even respond to him i know again and again and then and worse than that they actually

00:04:21.180 complained that churchill was you know being needy and and not writing when in fact it was them who

00:04:28.200 didn't write and churchill who wrote letter after letter begging them to show him some some interest

00:04:33.500 and visit them and what's also interesting even as a young man as a teenager churchill felt he was

00:04:41.020 destined you know the book's called walking with destiny he felt he was destined for greatness why did

00:04:45.740 why did he think he was destined for greatness yes i think in in what would be almost a psychological

00:04:51.640 disorder in other people was certainly a very powerful influence on him this idea that he would

00:04:58.820 as he told a 16 year old when he was a 16 year old school boy told another 16 year old school boy his

00:05:04.960 friend at harrow merlin devons said to him that there will be a great upheaval and a terrible struggle

00:05:11.100 in my life and i will be called upon to save london and save britain and of course i mean that's a

00:05:16.780 that's an extraordinary thing to say age 16 but half a century later precisely that happened

00:05:22.760 so he went to boarding schools as a young man or as a as a boy after that he went to military school

00:05:30.660 and he had a military career what was his military career like as a young man well as you say he went to

00:05:36.420 the royal military academy at sandhurst so that was his university really and then he went off to

00:05:42.880 fight on the northwest frontier of india against the various tribes that that attacked the british

00:05:48.300 empire up in the north there attempting to attack the punjab and he went off to cuba to watch the

00:05:57.760 spanish put down the upright or attempt to put down the uprising of the cuban rebels

00:06:02.820 in 1895 he went to south africa and to the sudan and in fact he fought in five campaigns on four

00:06:12.820 continents before he entered politics and one thing about him is like not only did he go to these

00:06:19.040 places but he wanted to see action like he wanted to be where the danger is at why was he so eager for

00:06:24.980 that i think not so much that he wants to be where the danger was but where whatever it was that was

00:06:31.260 important was happening he wanted to see for himself whatever was going on and that of course in the

00:06:37.560 military career did mean where the danger was but also in his political career he tended to uh to want

00:06:44.460 to be wherever it was that the most important thing was happening so it wasn't that he was as some people

00:06:50.380 have charged a sort of danger junkie who wanted to who got excitement from the um from bullets flying

00:06:57.760 he just wanted to make sure that he was actually on the spot of uh whatever was most important that

00:07:03.680 was going on which um eventually made him actually the world's best paid war correspondent yeah even

00:07:10.220 as a 20 year old that's he went to south africa for the boer wars not to fight but to report on it

00:07:17.000 that's right yes and it was extraordinary really the way in which he was able to do both in a sense he was

00:07:23.860 an officer in the british army there was no doubt which side he was on when uh his train was ambushed

00:07:30.420 by commandos he uh of course took the command of the men there on the ambush train and managed to get

00:07:39.080 part of it back through enemy lines and so there was no doubt that he was first and foremost a soldier

00:07:45.920 but but one who would then write about everything that um that was going on it was an interesting thing

00:07:51.680 that was even then fairly unusual and today totally unknown but when he also wrote about war he also

00:07:58.720 intended i mean some people would say he romanticized it and that he was kind of a war mogger do you think

00:08:03.360 that claim or that criticism holds true or has any water i don't think it does at all he actually did

00:08:09.480 come to the sharp end of war he saw men uh just like uh the end of the battle of omderman where he took

00:08:16.020 past in the last great cavalry charge of the british empire with the with the dead and wounded strewn over

00:08:22.680 thousands upon thousands of them strewn over the battlefield and so he uh he knew the the horrors of

00:08:30.180 war and knew them up close but there's no denying that he found it much more exciting than peacetime

00:08:36.040 and so it wasn't as i said earlier about uh about his his general attitude that he was a a sort of um

00:08:43.160 attention-seeking junkie he was somebody who really appreciated that in war if you're going to write

00:08:50.740 about it you need to be up close and personal so yeah by the time he was 25 he had fought in various

00:08:56.680 campaigns around the world became one of the highest paid war correspondents in the world all

00:09:01.920 before 25 so that can make you feel really bad about yourself because like when i was 25 i think

00:09:05.760 i was in law school that was it that was no it's worse for me i was working in the city i was a i was

00:09:12.380 a merchant banker investment banker and uh yeah absolutely i mean this guy the things that he had

00:09:19.940 achieved already by the time of 25 and he would say and he said that in his wonderful autobiography

00:09:24.540 my early life he said 20 to 25 those are the years those are the years that you can can really get

00:09:30.780 down to uh to taking risks and no one will blame you for mistakes and it's a wonderful um series of

00:09:37.460 phrases that he comes out with in his book so another thing people don't know about churchill

00:09:41.460 besides his political career is that he was actually one of the most notable historians of

00:09:46.060 the 20th century like he was a prolific writer where did he learn his craft was he formally educated in

00:09:52.260 history no he wasn't actually he i mean he he wasn't that he went to harrow school which was good and

00:09:59.560 and there were good history teachers there but he didn't take that beyond school age and yet he

00:10:05.500 wrote 37 books many of which were history books and biographies it was his passion he he after

00:10:13.580 making his living uh by his pen as a war correspondent as we mentioned earlier because his father didn't leave

00:10:20.320 him very much money and he had to take care of his brother and his mother he he wrote and one of the

00:10:26.700 things that he is always interested in and driving emotional force in his life was his sense of

00:10:33.760 history and so he wrote history books and he won the nobel prize for literature for them and how do you

00:10:39.920 think his appreciation for history shaped his outlook on his life i mean did it make him like this sort of

00:10:44.660 staunch reactionary traditionalist or was it something else that happened well no he i mean first of all he

00:10:50.580 wasn't a staunch reactionary traditionist until later on his career he crossed the floor of the house of

00:10:56.780 commons in 1904 became a liberal and was one of the founders of the british welfare state with david lloyd

00:11:03.000 george but what it did do was to allow him to see various threats to britain in their overall historical

00:11:10.960 contexts and so that was why he was one of the reasons why he was one of the only people certainly

00:11:18.620 the first person in british politics to warn against the threat posed by hitler and the nazis

00:11:24.320 because he saw the attempted hegemonization of europe as something that was in the long continuum of

00:11:31.920 british history going back to the spanish armada and louis the 14th and napoleon and so on and so

00:11:38.520 this was an essential prerequisite really for his being able to place the nazi threat in the correct 0.51

00:11:47.500 historical context and it also seemed like the way you described it throughout the book is that his

00:11:52.640 is a love of history in the past allowed him to be very forward thinking at the same time

00:11:57.180 that's right yes he he was another example will come of course after the second world war when he was

00:12:03.320 the first person in the west of any note to warn against the soviet threat the um the danger

00:12:10.260 posed by stalinism to eastern europe and indeed to the whole of europe and that speech that he made

00:12:16.560 in fulton missouri in march 1946 was deeply unpopular and he was accused of being a warmonger and denounced

00:12:23.600 in the press and in both congress and parliament and so on but uh actually showed tremendous foresight

00:12:29.840 another thing his appreciation for history and his knowledge his thorough knowledge of british history

00:12:35.080 that came to be very helpful during world war ii because it seemed like he'd fall back on that

00:12:40.240 as he was trying to mobilize and keep the british people together during you know all the bombings

00:12:46.820 and the sort of the threat of nazism coming to them yes very true he certainly did he would talk

00:12:52.220 about the spanish armada and about drake and about admiral nelson and the dangers to britain back in the

00:12:58.980 napoleonic wars and and he would therefore use history as a way of basically telling the british

00:13:04.400 people that you've been here before there've been threats of invasion in the past this is how we dealt

00:13:09.260 with it this is what we do and we came through and we will win and so he used history very powerfully

00:13:15.960 as a way of bolstering morale and fighting demoralization we're gonna take a quick break for

00:13:21.700 word from our sponsors and now back to the show was churchill a religious man like did he have that

00:13:29.540 sort of a bedrock for you know because he seems so steadfast was religion that that sort of bedrock

00:13:34.760 for him was it something else he um it wasn't really religion no he um was he believed in an almighty

00:13:42.080 but when you look theologically at it the sole duty of the almighty seems to have been

00:13:47.120 to look after winston churchill uh churchill had many many brushes with death in his life

00:13:53.840 had many accidents where he nearly died and he believed in what he called invisible wings that

00:14:00.020 were beating over him and protecting him but he was was not a conventionally religious man in any way

00:14:07.200 in fact he uh described his relationship to the church of england as being like that of the flying

00:14:12.240 buttress in that he supported the church but from the outside some have described churchill as sort

00:14:18.180 of spiritual but not religious in the sense that as you said he didn't go to church but he still had

00:14:23.360 a real capacity for wonder and a sense of the transcendent and he believed in absolute good and evil and the

00:14:28.780 heroic clash between those forces and he had a firm moral code a bedrock of principles like honor

00:14:34.180 loyalty and courage and he would take time to contemplate he would sit by his fireplace with

00:14:39.500 chart will reflecting he also seemed to have a different kind of faith as well sort of faith

00:14:44.920 in the british empire yes he had a secular faith in the in the british empire in a sense of also the

00:14:52.000 sort of whiggish progression of history he believed that people were were moving forward i'm not sure he

00:14:58.520 felt that way after auschwitz and the death camps were revealed i'm not sure that he had this sense that

00:15:05.180 mankind was getting better very much after after that but nonetheless for most of his life he tended

00:15:12.060 to believe in a in a general sense of of human progress so churchill after the boer war he got 0.51

00:15:19.080 elected to parliament he had a political career and then uh he was put in place as the first lord of the

00:15:25.560 admiralty but he made some blunders there he talked about what those blunders were and how it affected

00:15:30.860 his political career yes well as first lord of the admiralty he was in charge of the royal navy and

00:15:37.980 he came up with this uh this idea in many ways a genius concept which was to get the royal navy

00:15:44.120 through the dardanelles straits between europe and asia and lure it off uh constantinople modern day 1.00

00:15:51.460 istanbul and basically knock turkey knock the ottoman empire out of the central powers which would have 1.00

00:15:58.480 been a brilliant scheme if it had come off one of the great coups of the of world war one but

00:16:04.080 unfortunately as a result of some mine laying the night before the uh the attack we lost six ships

00:16:12.180 in uh the allies lost six ships on the day of the 18th of march 1915 and it was catastrophic and

00:16:20.680 instead of calling holding off churchill insisted on a land offensive on the european side on the

00:16:27.260 gallipoli peninsula which ultimately led to the killing or wounding of no fewer than 147 000 allied

00:16:35.320 troops and what happened to his career after that after that happened well he was forced to resign

00:16:41.000 was the was the first thing that happened to it in uh november 1915 but thereafter even when he was

00:16:47.380 brought back into the government again later in the first world war every time he gave a speech at

00:16:53.140 public meeting someone would shout out what about the dardanelles and this would carry on for another

00:16:58.680 15 longer uh years of his career was this the time that was known as churchill's wilderness years

00:17:04.600 the wilderness years actually started in 1930 when he resigned from the shadow cabinet from the

00:17:11.080 conservative shadow cabinet and then spent 10 years warning against hitler and the nazis but prior to

00:17:18.200 that he had a long period in government when he was chancellor of the exchequer and minister of the

00:17:25.200 colonies and various other important posts like that up to the conservatives defeat in the 1929 general

00:17:32.380 election well how did those mistakes he made that happened in world war one the dardanelles how did that

00:17:38.920 set him up for success during world war two did he learn from that experience he did learn yes no

00:17:44.460 exactly he made terrible mistakes in his life you know i don't want for a moment to think anybody to

00:17:49.520 think that churchill was not a deeply flawed individual he certainly was and he made a serious

00:17:55.080 mistake he made a mistake as chancellor of the exchequer in uh going on to the gold standard at the

00:18:00.980 wrong time at the wrong price in 1925 he got within suffrage wrong he got the abdication wrong he got the

00:18:08.500 dardanelles as i mentioned earlier very badly wrong you know this is not a man who got everything right in his

00:18:14.160 career by any means however he was a politician who learned from his mistakes and to pick up the one

00:18:20.460 that you mentioned the dardanelles he never once overruled the british chiefs of staff during the

00:18:27.020 second world war so even though constitutionally he could as minister of defense he actually never once

00:18:33.780 did that and that was the great message that he he took the great lesson that he learned from that

00:18:39.520 catastrophe so we mentioned that churchill was one of the few people who saw the dangers of

00:18:43.980 nazism when it started coming to rise and his his appreciation for history his knowledge of

00:18:48.940 history allowed him to do that but what did he have like any personal experience where he

00:18:52.920 you gave an almost unshakable belief that hitler had ambitions to conquer europe yes churchill as well

00:18:59.080 as being a historian and seeing nazism as it's uh as an historical threat in terms of the past

00:19:05.680 churchill also was a philocemite he liked jews he got on with jews personally grown up with them

00:19:11.880 his father had liked jews he uh represented jewish constituents he was a zionist uh support of the

00:19:18.020 balfour declaration and so of course he had an early warning system for the evils of the nazis and

00:19:25.400 and adult itler far earlier on than a lot of the other people sitting on the benches with him of his age

00:19:32.720 and class and background in britain at that time many of whom were anti-semitic and so that was

00:19:39.460 another of the ways that his sort of personal beliefs and background allowed him to be the first

00:19:45.360 major british politician to warn against what was happening and he was also one of the few leaders

00:19:50.720 who actually read hitler's mein Kampf and he tried to tell people okay look he says right here in the book

00:19:56.940 what he plans on doing and i think another thing you mentioned too was when he was working in india

00:20:02.360 like he saw like jihadis like he saw jihadist extremists yes yes well not just india also of course

00:20:09.300 the sudanese campaign uh where he was fighting against the forces of the caliphate all of the

00:20:14.840 drive really of the caliphate army what came down to islamic fundamentalist fanaticism and so you had

00:20:23.620 this sense that he um both in in india and africa came up very close and personal to the fanaticism

00:20:32.880 but in this case religious fanaticism of course but a fanaticism that he was to spot again 30 years

00:20:39.400 later in hitler and the nazis so one thing that that happened throughout churchill's life is that

00:20:44.480 he always got pushback he was always getting criticized he was described as a pusher something

00:20:48.980 you didn't do right you didn't you you weren't supposed to be publicly ambitious right but yeah

00:20:55.520 and then but also he got criticized for all the things he did but it didn't seem to phase him all

00:21:01.060 that much what was it about churchill's character or past you know experience in life that allowed

00:21:06.940 him just to be so stoic in the face of so much criticism thrown at him well i i'm i've got a rather

00:21:12.420 politically incorrect response to that really which is that i know it's tremendously bad to the

00:21:18.540 have a sense of entitlement in public life today but he was tremendously entitled he was the son

00:21:26.880 well the grandson of the duke he'd been born in a palace at the very apex of victorian society

00:21:33.600 and which he considered to be the greatest society up until that point in the history of the world so

00:21:40.000 he really didn't care terribly much what other people thought of him which of course is not always

00:21:46.000 very good in democratic politics but boy did he need that in the decade of the wilderness years

00:21:51.540 in the 1930s when he was shouted down in the house of commons decried nearly he nearly had his seat

00:21:57.920 taken away from him by the conservatives he was attacked in the press constantly he had a thick skin

00:22:03.680 partly down to his extremely in sort of grand backgrounds that allowed him not to care what other

00:22:11.420 people thought of him there's a picture in the book of him when he was seven and he looks like

00:22:16.040 like an aristocrat even at seven years old i know that way that is he's got a he's got his hand on his

00:22:22.140 hip and uh and his uh nose pointed up yes exactly and he's he's seven years old and he and he might as well

00:22:28.800 be a duke himself so yeah he didn't have that middle class you know status anxiety he wasn't worried

00:22:34.760 about his place he just he knew what his place was and he just just kept on boogering on precisely

00:22:40.260 that yes there wasn't a there wasn't a middle class bone in his body and he knew it but here's

00:22:45.620 the interesting thing like he was an aristocrat but he wasn't a snob but no no he uh he didn't have

00:22:50.820 any snobbishness that i was able to spot in four years of reading his papers and his letters and uh

00:22:57.420 and all that he and actually when you look at his friends although although two of them admittedly

00:23:03.180 were dukes the next sort of seven or eight of his closest friends were lower middle class came

00:23:09.400 from from very humble background some of them and he treated them absolutely precisely the same as uh

00:23:16.100 as people who were born to the purple so an important person in churchill's life was his wife

00:23:22.200 clementine what role did his wife play in his career throughout his life she was very important

00:23:27.040 actually uh he didn't take political advice very well from uh from most people but he would take

00:23:33.300 it from clementine he had this sense that she was only interested in his best interests unlike some

00:23:40.500 other uh politicians and other advisors and um and so that gave her a special imprimatur and her 0.98

00:23:47.080 advice was usually very good in fact he was somebody who loved his wife very dearly and was and was

00:23:53.580 faithful to her and and they had a very happy marriage but he also respected her um political

00:24:00.040 opinions although he did not ask her about grand strategy or or uh you know take her advice on or

00:24:07.680 even ask her advice and she certainly never gave her advice on on sort of military matters or anything

00:24:13.120 like that but speaking of churchill's family life he did have four children how what was his

00:24:18.660 relationship like with them like was it did he replicate the what happened with him and his father

00:24:23.360 or was it did he try to do something different sadly he did he did to an extent replicate what

00:24:28.460 happened with his father um he had a terrible relationship with his son randolph he nonetheless

00:24:33.780 called after his father who was a heavy drinker and was not had none of the charm of his father

00:24:41.000 some of the brilliant intellect of his father but uh they had endless rows he loved he loved him but

00:24:47.760 very soon after they got together on every occasion pretty much there would be a a bad tempered spat

00:24:55.460 so it wasn't it wasn't very happy one of his daughters died um very young and that was a tragedy for the both

00:25:03.780 of the parents and then there were two other daughters who sorry three other daughters two of whom 1.00

00:25:10.100 died early one as a result of suicide and the other as a result of drinking so it was not a uh it was

00:25:17.600 not uniformly happy the other daughter mary soames lived to a lovely happy old age and was personally

00:25:24.700 completely delightful but uh but no overall it's very difficult to be the the son or daughter of a

00:25:31.760 great man and although he himself pulled it off his children didn't yeah i've seen that in other the

00:25:37.420 lives of other great men like theodore roosevelt who is very much like winston churchill as i was

00:25:42.740 reading this had very similar lives but his family life his kids had a lot of problems as well that's

00:25:48.660 right it's not easy is it you see it again and again in in history that uh so much is expected

00:25:54.280 and if the child can't live up to that then it's often um uh in in some form of self-destruction that

00:26:02.160 the whole um sort of process pans out yeah i'm speaking of theodore roosevelt i'm a big fan of

00:26:07.520 him and as i was reading this i was like their lives were very similar both were sort of aristocratic

00:26:12.120 you know churchill was obviously an aristocrat roosevelt was sort of a scion of new york but they

00:26:17.360 both had that same temperament of wanting to be in the you know seeing the action wanted to be where

00:26:20.760 everything's at both uh literary men as well both became great leaders of their country uh did these

00:26:26.640 two ever cross paths when uh yes they met once and they didn't get on and um and when uh and when

00:26:34.140 um theodore roosevelt sort of alice was asked why he said oh they're far too alike and uh i think

00:26:41.960 there's something in that i think that might well have been the reason i think they spotted uh that

00:26:46.620 uh that they were very alike and and as a result that they clashed rather than uh became firm friends

00:26:52.500 so the popular image of churchill is a sort of scowling no-nonsense man wearing a bowler chomping

00:26:58.780 on a cigar but the churchill that emerges in your book is very emotional he's funny he's full of life

00:27:05.240 he's also imaginative sometimes had premonitions about things and allowed intuition to guide his

00:27:11.280 decisions so i mean he seemed to really feel things deeply how do you think churchill's

00:27:17.120 sentimentalism and romantic outlook helped him as a leader well he was precisely you're right

00:27:22.480 he was driven by his passions um to an extraordinary degree and he burst into tears 50 times during the

00:27:29.060 second world war for example um which must have been quite off-putting to see the prime minister in

00:27:33.660 the house of commons starting to cry but nonetheless people recognized that he wasn't the buttoned up

00:27:39.080 victorian aristocrat he was actually a sort of throwback from it to an earlier era the romantic

00:27:44.920 regency figure where people did wear their hearts on their sleeves they didn't mind showing their

00:27:50.640 emotions in public so in recent years there's been a lot of criticisms lobbed at churchill

00:27:56.160 like he was a racist that he tried to commit genocide in india during world war ii that he was the 0.70

00:28:02.080 mastermind behind the dresden bombings are there i mean based on this new information you've gotten

00:28:06.820 are there is there much validity to these criticisms i don't think there is really no not when it's seen

00:28:12.320 in its proper historical context churchill was uh at school while charl darwin was still alive and

00:28:19.140 people did believe that there were hierarchies of races in those days and however absurd and indeed

00:28:25.800 obscene we might think that today at the time it was considered an actual scientific fact and um what

00:28:32.840 he took from that was actually the exact opposite of what hitler and the nazis took from it which was

00:28:38.960 that he believed that the british had a profound responsibility and duty to the people the native

00:28:45.220 peoples of the empire um and that's what he dedicated his life to so uh i see this criticism of the him

00:28:52.960 in some way encouraging uh genocide at the time of the bengal famine as being absolutely uh well as well 0.99

00:28:59.820 as factually incorrect also completely the opposite of what winston churchill was trying to do in fact when

00:29:05.980 you look at his letters to president roosevelt asking for for wheat and and grain to be sent to

00:29:11.720 india not just roosevelt as well the prime ministers of australia and canada as well he wouldn't be doing

00:29:17.240 that if he was a genocidal maniac he did everything that was possible at the time to save the bengali

00:29:24.260 the starving bengalis but of course with the normal places that one buys grain in these circumstances

00:29:31.940 such as burma and thailand and malaya under japanese occupation it was next to impossible to

00:29:38.380 get grain in overseas these are perfectly reasonable um responses i think to a totally unreasonable

00:29:46.440 ahistorical series of attacks on him with regard to the the bombing of dresden which i go into in some

00:29:54.120 detail in my book the fact is that the railway nodal points from east to west went through dresden and

00:30:01.300 dresden the russians begged us to uh to destroy these and we did the best we possibly could on the 0.78

00:30:07.520 night of the 13th of february 1945 um the reason that so many people died in dresden and by the way

00:30:14.180 it was about 20 000 not the 120 that the nazis claimed and which unfortunately some ex-historians

00:30:21.260 like david irving also propound the reason nevertheless that 20 000 people died was that the local gauleiter

00:30:29.180 of dresden didn't provide proper air raid precautions in the city not thinking that it was

00:30:35.420 ever going to be hit but but it was hit and it was a perfectly reasonable legitimate military target

00:30:41.440 so you know churchill became a great leader during world war ii do you think he was born a great leader

00:30:48.700 did he fashion himself into one he very much fashions himself into one he went out very deliberately

00:30:55.180 as a young man to become a great man and and you see this again and again in the early chapters i

00:31:02.700 think of of my book he he felt that he was walking with destiny but it was very much a destiny that he

00:31:08.860 was going to fashion himself what do you think are the leadership lessons people could take today from

00:31:15.020 the life of churchill oh there are so many there are some on pretty much every page his foresight

00:31:20.860 which we've gone into his personal courage and both physical and moral his ability to learn from

00:31:29.180 lessons his sheer resilience coming back from disaster after disaster really well andrew this

00:31:36.540 has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book well the first place

00:31:40.020 i'd like them to go to obviously is their local independent bookshop or amazon but there are the reviews

00:31:46.220 are on my website www.andrew-roberts.net um but uh but really the best thing if you want to know

00:31:57.100 more about winston churchill is to uh is to get the book well andrew roberts thank you so much for

00:32:01.500 time it's been a pleasure it's been a delight thank you very much indeed my guest today was andrew

00:32:05.900 roberts he's the author of the book churchill walking with destiny it's available on amazon.com

00:32:10.220 and bookstores everywhere you can find out more information about his work at his website andrew-roberts.net

00:32:15.340 or check out our show notes at aom.is slash churchill where you find links to resources

00:32:19.340 where you can delve deeper into this topic

00:32:20.700 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at

00:32:31.460 artofmanlius.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles we've

00:32:35.740 written over the years including an in-depth series about life lessons from winston churchill

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00:33:09.200 reminding you not only to listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action

00:33:14.020 you

The Art of Manliness - September 18, 2019

#544： The Audacious Life of Winston Churchill

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