TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Winston Churchill - Andrew Roberts

00:00:01.000 He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes.

00:00:05.000 He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times.

00:00:10.000 He got so close to the German trenches

00:00:12.000 he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches.

00:00:15.000 He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life

00:00:18.000 as to be shot at without result.

00:00:21.000 The Conservatives tried to deselect him

00:00:23.000 and every single thing that he said turned out to be right

00:00:27.000 and everything that they said turned out to be wrong.

00:00:35.000 Andrew Roberts, such a delight to have you on the show.

00:00:37.000 You are, of course, the author of many, many books,

00:00:39.000 but the one we really want to talk to you about

00:00:41.000 is one that in internet terms has gone viral

00:00:44.000 and continues to sell tens of thousands of copies every year,

00:00:48.000 is Churchill Walking With Destiny.

00:00:50.000 And we wanted to spend some time, a long time actually,

00:00:53.000 talking to you about here in Westminster where we're sitting

00:00:56.000 about a man who shaped the destiny of this country,

00:01:00.000 the history of this country,

00:01:02.000 about whom actually people of my generation,

00:01:04.000 we've got a couple of young guys here,

00:01:06.000 having been educated in this country,

00:01:08.000 we know very little about.

00:01:10.000 Very little about.

00:01:11.000 Well, that's partly because he's not taught

00:01:13.000 in the schools any longer.

00:01:15.000 He used to be, but now he isn't.

00:01:17.000 You can get through your entire history syllabus

00:01:20.000 and only learn about Winston Churchill for 14 seconds on a video.

00:01:25.000 Yes. Well, we are going to counteract that by spending some time doing it.

00:01:29.000 So I suppose the best place to start would be right at the beginning.

00:01:33.000 I really want to spend some time with you talking about Churchill's life from the beginning to the end.

00:01:38.000 I went to Chartwell, which is the house...

00:01:43.000 Yes, it's a beautiful manor house in Kent, which he bought when he was about 60

00:01:47.000 and lived in for the rest of his life.

00:01:49.000 Yes. And when you go there, you suddenly realise, uneducated as I am,

00:01:53.000 I mean, this guy, he lived about seven lives worth of lives in like one section of his life.

00:01:59.000 We'll get to all of that later.

00:02:02.000 But from the beginning, where was he born?

00:02:05.000 How did he grow up?

00:02:06.000 What was the kind of beginnings of Churchill's life?

00:02:08.000 Well, he was born in a much grander place even than Chartwell.

00:02:11.000 He was born in Blenheim Palace, which is the grandest of all the ducal palaces.

00:02:16.000 The Spencer Churchill's magnificent palace in Oxfordshire.

00:02:20.000 And he was born there because his grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough.

00:02:24.000 And his father was a very successful politician, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Churchill.

00:02:31.000 And his mother was an American heiress called Jenny Jerome.

00:02:35.000 And so, yes, he grew up as an upper class Victorian, essentially.

00:02:42.000 Not exactly humble beginnings.

00:02:44.000 But then he actually, having been educated, and my understanding is he wasn't a particularly successful student.

00:02:49.000 Is that right?

00:02:50.000 Well, actually, he made out that he was less successful student than he was.

00:02:54.000 In fact, he was pretty good at, he came in the top third of all his classes.

00:02:59.000 He came top of history and English quite a lot in his classes.

00:03:03.000 So when you read his school reports, they're an awful lot better than he made himself out to be.

00:03:08.000 But he certainly wasn't an A-class student.

00:03:11.000 He wasn't going to go to Oxford or Cambridge, for example.

00:03:14.000 And why did he do that?

00:03:15.000 Why did he paint himself as intellectually mediocre?

00:03:19.000 Surely that's not the smartest play, particularly if you want to lead a country.

00:03:24.000 Well, exactly.

00:03:25.000 He was a very unusual person, frankly.

00:03:30.000 His autobiography, and this is where he made himself out to be a bit thicker than he genuinely was, is the most beautifully written book.

00:03:37.000 It's called My Early Life. It was published in 1930. I do recommend anybody read it.

00:03:44.000 But you have to work out the bits where he's playing with the reader as opposed to just giving them the sort of word for word accuracy about his life.

00:03:54.000 So he was good at school, but not great. And where did he go from there?

00:04:00.000 Because in my understanding, he tried to go to, I think it's Sandhurst several times.

00:04:04.000 It was the third attempt, wasn't it, that he got into Sandhurst?

00:04:07.000 That's right. And he got in for the cavalry rather than the infantry.

00:04:10.000 The cool kids went for the infantry. The ones who weren't so successful went for the cavalry.

00:04:16.000 His father was angry with him about that because it was much more expensive to put a boy through as a cavalry officer.

00:04:24.000 Of course, you had to buy the horse apart from myself.

00:04:27.000 And he had this belief in himself, though, that drove him all the way through his life, this driving sense of personal destiny.

00:04:38.000 His father wasn't kind to him. He never seems to have appreciated that there was anything special about young Winston.

00:04:47.000 His mother loved him but saw virtually nothing of him in the way that Edwardian parents sometimes did, especially the aristocratic ones.

00:04:55.000 She was having affairs with the Prince of Wales and the Austrian ambassador and so on, and saw very little of him and his younger brother, Jack.

00:05:03.000 But nonetheless, he did do well at Sandhurst because he loves everything, absolutely everything to do with soldiering.

00:05:10.000 And you talk about his parents, effectively, either not being present or not being kind to him.

00:05:16.000 Did he have formative personalities in his life, people who guided him when he was younger, inspired him, drove him, challenged him?

00:05:24.000 Very much he did, yes. The first of which actually was a woman called Elizabeth Everest, who was his nanny.

00:05:30.000 And he loved and worshipped her and she was kind to him and showed him the love and affection that he wasn't, frankly, getting from his parents.

00:05:41.000 And then there was a man who was a great orator, an American politician called Burt Cochran, who was one of his mother's lovers, who also became a sort of father figure to him after his own father, Lord Randolph, died in 1895 when his father was 45 and Winston was 20.

00:06:03.000 Hmm. And the other thing I wanted to pick up sort of going away from the story of his life for just one second, you mentioned that he was a Victorian.

00:06:11.000 And there'll be a lot of young people who don't really know what that means exactly, because this was a society of people who different values and different viewpoints and different approaches to many things to what we have today.

00:06:23.000 What does it mean for someone to be a Victorian?

00:06:26.000 Well, to be an aristocratic Victorian in the period that he was growing up, which was essentially the 1880s and the 1890s, meant that you were a believer in the Empire.

00:06:37.000 He was born in 1874 and he believed that the British Empire was a good thing for civilisation and the world in a way that obviously is not taught in any way today.

00:06:49.000 Put it very mildly there.

00:06:51.000 To put it very mildly. And this had the very positive aspects of essentially he thought he was recreating a combination of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, where Britain was going to be able to teach the native peoples of the Empire development in many, many areas of human development.

00:07:08.000 And it had the negative side also, of course, of a belief that you were the very top, the apex of the sort of human condition, that you were racially superior to everybody else because you were white and you were also racially superior to every other white because you were British. 0.70

00:07:25.000 And this meant that there was a sense, you get it very much, of course, from Darwinism, Charles Darwin was still alive whilst Churchill was a boy, that there was a sort of a pinnacle.

00:07:40.000 And that Key being upper class and British and white was at the absolute top of the pinnacle.

00:07:45.000 Now, what this meant was that he had deep responsibilities to everybody else.

00:07:49.000 This is something that's often misunderstood or ignored, that because he was at the top of the pinnacle, essentially, it was his duty to spend the rest of his life doing good things for everybody else.

00:08:03.000 Privilege had a deep sense of responsibility attached to it, which sometimes we forget about that aspect of Victorian chivalry.

00:08:13.000 And with that, coming back to the story now, by the way, we should say for our American and other viewers, Sandhurst is, of course, the military academy.

00:08:20.000 It's their West, our West Point.

00:08:22.000 Just better.

00:08:24.000 You're going to get all the hate mail now from the very angry Americans who have guns.

00:08:29.000 Yeah.

00:08:30.000 But, so he goes to Sandhurst, and is that part of why he wants to go into a military career, because it is a career of service to your country?

00:08:38.000 Yes, very much.

00:08:40.000 It's the ethos of Sandhurst, like West Point, in fact, is this concept of giving back to society because of the privileges that you yourself have enjoyed in life.

00:08:52.000 And he did have huge privileges, as I mentioned earlier about his family.

00:08:57.000 However, actually, both his parents were terrible spendthrifts.

00:09:01.000 They spent his inheritance, certainly his mother did after his father died.

00:09:06.000 He had to work very hard.

00:09:07.000 He wound up becoming the best paid war correspondent in the world when he fought in the Boer War in South Africa.

00:09:15.000 So it wasn't as though he actually was rich.

00:09:19.000 He never was, actually.

00:09:21.000 He was pretty much broke all his life until he wrote the war memoirs of the Second World War when he was in his early 70s.

00:09:29.000 Wow.

00:09:30.000 So money was always an issue for him.

00:09:33.000 And you wouldn't think that by just a superficial glance at the man himself.

00:09:37.000 No, but that's because he always bought the best of everything.

00:09:40.000 And the reason was that he was always in debt and he could afford things because he was constantly getting into debt.

00:09:47.000 There are two points in the 1930s where he nearly had to sell that beautiful house Chartwell that you visited because he was always broke.

00:09:56.000 And this is a good thing as far as historians like me are concerned, because what it meant was that he had to write 37 books and write over 800 articles.

00:10:06.000 And the way, of course, that's the best way to get into the mind of a man like Churchill is to read what he wrote.

00:10:12.000 And as a result, we have an awful lot of it, many millions of words.

00:10:16.000 He wrote more than Shakespeare and Dickens put together.

00:10:18.000 Wow.

00:10:19.000 And what's his career in the military successful?

00:10:21.000 It was it was after fashion.

00:10:24.000 But the trouble was, of course, he did need to make money and be a war correspondent.

00:10:27.000 So the soldiers always thought of him as a journalist and the journalists always thought of him as a soldier.

00:10:33.000 And that meant he could never really get to the top in the British Army.

00:10:37.000 The highest he got was to be a colonel in the First World War.

00:10:42.000 But he fought on five campaigns on four continents.

00:10:49.000 It was an amazing, amazing military career.

00:10:52.000 He took part in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire at the Battle of Onderman, where he charged with the 21st Lancers.

00:11:00.000 He went into no man's land in the First World War some 30 times and doing trench raids and so on.

00:11:08.000 So he showed tremendous courage.

00:11:12.000 And the people talk about his courage and they talk about his particularly when it comes to his military career and obviously afterwards.

00:11:19.000 How did that shape the way he viewed war and conflict?

00:11:22.000 Well, he hated war.

00:11:24.000 He was not a warmonger.

00:11:26.000 He was accused all his life of being a warmonger.

00:11:28.000 But because he'd come up close and personal to death, seen so many of his friends killed from the age of 21 onwards, he had seen his close friends die in war.

00:11:39.000 He never was a warmonger.

00:11:41.000 He believed in deterring war by military strength.

00:11:46.000 And so that was his immediate feeling about war.

00:11:52.000 However, once war had started, he believed in winning it.

00:11:56.000 And he was absolutely fascinated by every aspect of war.

00:12:01.000 He would go out of his way to use scientific knowledge to try to ensure that Britain was at the absolute forefront, the cutting edge of all the new war technologies.

00:12:13.000 Of course, in a sense, he's the godfather of the tank, which completely altered the whole nature of war and still has.

00:12:20.000 And Andrew, just flesh out the military career for us first.

00:12:24.000 So he goes to Sandhurst.

00:12:26.000 Goes to Sandhurst.

00:12:27.000 And then what happens from there?

00:12:28.000 And then he gets sent off to India, fights in the northwest frontier of India, where he fights against the various clans and tribes such as the Taliban, the grandparents essentially of the Taliban,

00:12:44.000 and the Afridi tribes that were attacking the Punjabi farmers.

00:12:52.000 So he defended the Punjabis up in the northwest frontier.

00:12:56.000 Then he went off to Cuba and fought on the side of the Spanish in Cuba, really more watching than fighting.

00:13:05.000 But nonetheless, on his 21st birthday, he heard bullets fired.

00:13:10.000 He was tremendously lucky that he was never hit.

00:13:13.000 He once said that there's nothing so exhilarating in life as to be shot at without result.

00:13:19.000 And he was shot at without result a great deal.

00:13:23.000 And he then fought in the Sudanese campaign.

00:13:26.000 So he went back to northwest frontier, then the Sudanese campaign, what's called the River War in 1898, when he took part in this great cavalry charge.

00:13:35.000 And then he fought in the Boer War in 1899 and 1900.

00:13:40.000 And then he got elected to parliament.

00:13:42.000 So he had fought in all of those wars prior to, of course, later on fighting in the First World War.

00:13:48.000 And the Boer War in particular, I think, is a moment when his courage really comes through because there is this incredible story about him having to work his way through without any...

00:14:00.000 I don't want to miss tell the story.

00:14:03.000 He essentially escapes from prison.

00:14:04.000 Yes.

00:14:05.000 Yes.

00:14:06.000 He gets captured after taking part in the defense of a train which has been ambushed by the Boers, the Afrikaans, white South Africans. 0.91

00:14:15.000 And he gets put in a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria and then escapes and makes his way 300 miles through enemy territory.

00:14:25.000 At one point, he has to sleep down in a mine.

00:14:30.000 And the candle gutters out that he was given and he could feel the rats scurrying over his face down in the depths of this mine.

00:14:40.000 And he manages, at another point, he's actually followed by a vulture.

00:14:44.000 And nonetheless, he manages to escape to freedom in Mozambique.

00:14:49.000 So this is the thing really that, A, tells him that he's got something special.

00:14:55.000 He always thought he had anyhow, but this actually does give him the sense that he's special.

00:15:02.000 And also, of course, it makes him a hero of the British Empire because he has escaped.

00:15:06.000 And he did it in the same week as a series of disastrous defeats for the British Empire.

00:15:13.000 It's called Black Week because there are three serious military defeats in one week.

00:15:18.000 And the only really good news at that time was Winston Churchill successfully escaping from prison.

00:15:24.000 Wow.

00:15:25.000 Wow. So he almost became a celebrity of his time then, really?

00:15:28.000 Not almost. He was. He was the first great modern celebrity, war celebrity, as it were, yeah.

00:15:35.000 Oh, wow. So did that then help with his transition into becoming a politician?

00:15:41.000 Precisely that, yes. He'd already stood for Parliament once for Oldham in Lancashire and failed to get elected.

00:15:50.000 But now, when he came back after this extraordinary prison escape, his celebrity status did help him get elected with a decent majority.

00:16:01.000 So he was a politician and then he decided to enlist during the First World War?

00:16:06.000 During the Boer War.

00:16:08.000 During the Boer War, yes.

00:16:09.000 Absolutely. But he'd already fought in the Boer War. So he came back in order to stand.

00:16:14.000 And he'd already stood for Parliament before he went out to the Boer War and had lost.

00:16:20.000 And then he went back having fought in the Boer War and won.

00:16:24.000 And then I guess what Francis is getting at is what happens when World War One breaks out.

00:16:29.000 He's, I'm assuming, an MP at this point?

00:16:31.000 Well, this is 15 years later, of course. So, yes, he's actually the First Lord of the Admiralty.

00:16:38.000 So, by this stage, he, in 1915, he'd become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911.

00:16:45.000 By the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he was still First Lord of the Admiralty.

00:16:51.000 And he managed to get the whole of the British Expeditionary Force, over 100,000 men, across to France without losing a single man from German U-boats or any other disaster.

00:17:04.000 So, he was very successful in that. He had the British Navy ready for the First World War.

00:17:10.000 And then the catastrophe of the Dardanelles struck.

00:17:15.000 And this was largely his fault. He was the person who believed that if you could get the British Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean from the Eastern Mediterranean up through the Dardanelles Straits

00:17:29.000 and anchor it off Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, you would be able, through the threat of shelling, to take the Turkish Empire out of the First World War.

00:17:46.440 And if that had happened, it would have been one of the greatest strategic victories of modern warfare.

00:17:51.720 But it didn't. And on the 18th of March 1915, the Anglo-French flotilla lost no fewer than six ships, either destroyed or sunk.

00:18:01.780 So, we had to pull back. And then they attacked five weeks later, on the 25th of April 1915, and got horribly stuck on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which is on the western side of the Straits.

00:18:17.440 And in the end, no fewer than 147,000 men were killed or wounded in that campaign.

00:18:24.240 And it completely wrecked Churchill's career, because it had been his idea.

00:18:28.580 And he decided that he was going to leave the government and fight in the trenches.

00:18:34.420 He didn't need to. He was 40 years old. We weren't calling up married 40-year-olds at that stage.

00:18:39.680 But he did, because he wanted a form of redemption. And that's why he went to join the army.

00:18:45.580 That's absolutely incredible.

00:18:47.880 Can you imagine any politician doing that today?

00:18:49.860 God.

00:18:50.860 No, is the blunt way of putting it. But also, as well, in many ways, that was facing certain death, because many men who went to fight in World War I didn't come back.

00:19:01.980 Officers in some stretches of the same front that he was fighting on had a six-week-long survival rate.

00:19:10.340 Their longevity for fighting the trenches was six weeks.

00:19:15.580 So when he went to fight, how long did that career last?

00:19:19.580 He was there for a year. He was fortunate. It was one of the quieter sides of the front.

00:19:27.960 However, as I mentioned, he went on 30 trench raids.

00:19:32.660 And he got so close to the German trenches, he could actually hear them speaking in their trenches.

00:19:37.180 So you can imagine how dangerous that was.

00:19:40.100 There was one occasion when a German whiz-bang, high-explosive shell, came and hit his dugout and decapitated everyone inside it.

00:19:49.500 But he had left five minutes earlier.

00:19:51.160 And he said on that occasion that he felt as if he could hear invisible wings beating over him, a real sense that he was being kept for something important in life.

00:20:04.580 And he had that sense about him.

00:20:08.240 This is why I called my book Walking with Destiny.

00:20:11.280 Because although he, of course, himself said that he felt as if he were walking with destiny and that all his past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial, all the way through his life he thought he was walking with destiny.

00:20:24.240 It wasn't just in May 1940 when Hitler invaded Europe.

00:20:28.740 He was born two months prematurely, which in Victorian England could be a death sentence.

00:20:35.860 He nearly died of pneumonia when he was 11.

00:20:39.760 He was involved in three car crashes, two plane crashes, nearly drowned in Lake Geneva, very nearly died in a house fire.

00:20:52.060 It's incredible how close he came to death on so many occasions and the event, including, of course, that time when he left the dugout and it got hit.

00:21:01.040 And the result was that he felt that he was being specially kept back for a great occasion.

00:21:09.340 That's so interesting.

00:21:10.220 And one of the things I was going to ask you, we've got past it now, but I can't imagine being somebody in charge of tens of thousands of men, ships, your country's war effort and making a cock up that costs men lives, that causes your country to suffer a defeat in a major war in public.

00:21:34.840 And then, you know, you're so gutted by that experience, you go into the trenches to fight.

00:21:40.920 I imagine that's a bit of a setback in terms of your self-image.

00:21:44.400 I imagine that's really difficult to preserve that sense of destiny in that moment.

00:21:49.460 He must have been distraught.

00:21:50.700 He was distraught.

00:21:51.700 His wife said it was the only time that he ever seriously considered committing suicide.

00:21:55.600 He took up painting, which helped, in fact, helped him emotionally and psychologically.

00:22:04.120 But yes, I mean, people would still, even in the 1930s, so 15 plus years later, would still shout, what about the Dardanelles at him when he was making speeches in public addresses?

00:22:16.420 And in one, in fact, funnily enough, he stood for Westminster, just here, this constituency, and people would shout at him, you know, what about the Dardanelles?

00:22:28.620 And so you do have a real sense that he was, that he understood this setback.

00:22:37.160 But one of the great things about Winston Churchill was that he learned from his mistakes, and never in the Second World War, when he was Prime Minister in the Second World War, never once did he overrule the chiefs of staff in the way that he had done in the First World War in order to pursue the Dardanelles expedition.

00:22:53.680 So he actually learned from that mistake, and it was a very important lesson to learn, of course.

00:23:00.100 Oh, sorry, go for it. I was going to say, he talked frequently, he gave it a term, which is depression was the black dog. 0.95

00:23:08.080 Was that, do you think that stemmed from the experience with the Dardanelles in Constantinople?

00:23:14.360 The only time he ever used that phrase black dog, he only used it once, was in a letter to his wife in July 1911, when he was talking about a particular moment of depression.

00:23:25.500 He was not a black dog depressive, as in, it didn't suddenly strike him for no reason.

00:23:32.560 He got depressed for the same reason that anybody would get depressed under those circumstances.

00:23:37.420 The classic examples being the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, the fall of Singapore in February 1942.

00:23:44.900 These are moments when anyone would have got depressed.

00:23:46.980 He wasn't somebody who had a sort of chemical imbalance.

00:23:49.860 And as we know with actual manic depression, which black dog is, a terrible, terrible disease, that you can't chair over 900 meetings of the Defence Committee of the Cabinet at all times of day or night if you are suffering from that kind of depression.

00:24:10.400 So, it's a misunderstanding to think that he was a manic depressive.

00:24:15.600 He wasn't.

00:24:16.340 He got sad when sad things happened.

00:24:19.020 Yeah, precisely.

00:24:19.860 Yes, exactly.

00:24:20.700 Which happened a lot in his life, of course, because his whole life was a total rollercoaster up and down the entire time.

00:24:26.820 Well, right.

00:24:27.300 And so, he fights in World War I, and World War I, many people have argued, Peter Hitchens, who's been on our show, you wrote a whole book about it, was really the moment when the British Empire starts to feel like it's on the downslope.

00:24:44.600 Was he aware of this at the time?

00:24:46.680 Did he feel this?

00:24:47.480 Did he say anything about it?

00:24:48.660 He was acutely aware of it.

00:24:50.240 Absolutely, he was.

00:24:51.000 And, of course, it was in his great 1942 speech that was made at the Guildhall when he said, I did not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.

00:25:02.560 He was very, very aware that Britain was becoming weaker.

00:25:09.140 This was obviously clear with regard to the Quit India campaign of the Congress Party in India.

00:25:16.240 He was very much stood up against Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s.

00:25:21.920 He saw the way in which the United States was becoming richer and more powerful and was likely one day to take the place of the British Empire, and he didn't like it.

00:25:32.660 He preferred the Americans to take over from anyone else, the Germans or any fascist power.

00:25:39.740 But, nonetheless, he didn't like the idea of Britain's place in the sun being taken by anybody else.

00:25:46.840 This was a natural reaction, of course, of a British imperialist of his age and class and background.

00:25:52.800 Well, quite.

00:25:53.680 And so he fights in World War I, and what happens then?

00:25:57.920 Is he, by the way, is he, from a public perception, you mentioned people continue to heckle him about the Dardanelles, etc.

00:26:03.620 But does his decision to go and fight rehabilitate him in the public consciousness in any way?

00:26:09.020 In a sense it does, and he does come back to become Minister of Munitions for the rest of the last part of the First World War.

00:26:18.460 And there he does a fantastic job.

00:26:20.580 And you look at the graphs of output of shells necessary and all the various other munitions necessary to win that war.

00:26:27.000 And they go straight, you know, off the charts, he worked so hard.

00:26:32.420 And that's appreciated too.

00:26:34.360 Then he became Minister of War and was in charge of demobilisation of the army.

00:26:38.260 He did a very good job there as well.

00:26:40.860 But he also put his reputation, essentially damaged his reputation again,

00:26:46.840 because he was tremendously in favour of strangling, in his words,

00:26:52.580 and he had the most extraordinary mastery of the English language, as you can imagine,

00:26:57.000 strangling Bolshevism in its cradle. 0.65

00:27:00.500 He wanted to send the British army, or at least a proportion of the British army,

00:27:04.740 to help the white Russians try to destroy Bolshevism. 0.51

00:27:08.580 And he's been criticised an awful lot for that.

00:27:11.100 He's been attacked.

00:27:11.720 There's just a book last week that was published saying how terrible this was.

00:27:15.440 But frankly, I think it was a brave thing to do.

00:27:20.820 If you had managed to strangle Bolshevism and you hadn't had Soviet communism, 0.80

00:27:25.120 about 100 million people would be, their lives would have been saved,

00:27:30.820 who were murdered by communism of various types in the 20th century.

00:27:35.600 So actually, I think it was a very farsighted thing to have done.

00:27:38.560 But at the time, it was another thing that he was accused of having been disastrously wrong about.

00:27:47.260 When we look at his political career, he had a very interesting political career,

00:27:50.940 because there were many times he was actually criticised by both the Conservatives and Labour.

00:27:57.480 And the Liberals as well, of course.

00:27:59.320 Well, I mean, he changed sides twice as well.

00:28:02.400 Well, he started off as a Conservative, like his father had been.

00:28:05.540 And then in 1904, over free trade, he became a Liberal.

00:28:09.100 And then in 1924, again over free trade, he went back to the Conservatives.

00:28:14.200 You know, he kept his belief, but the parties changed theirs, and he stuck to his beliefs.

00:28:21.480 But it looked very much as though he was just jumping ship,

00:28:24.580 because each time he jumped ship just before that party got into government.

00:28:28.700 And so he was thought of very often as being just an opportunist.

00:28:35.940 And he did make mistakes. That's the other thing.

00:28:38.260 He wrote to his wife when he was in the trenches.

00:28:40.140 He said, I should have made nothing if I had not made mistakes.

00:28:43.400 He got loads of things wrong.

00:28:45.380 We've already got the Russian Civil War, the Gallipoli campaign, which was the biggest of them.

00:28:51.700 But he was opposed to female suffrage at the beginning.

00:28:54.680 He was opposed to – he wanted to bring Britain into the gold standard at the wrong time,

00:29:00.560 at the wrong level, as it turned out.

00:29:03.420 He was in favour of the black and tans, trying to put down the Irish uprisings of the early 1920s as well,

00:29:11.620 which horribly boomeranged on the British.

00:29:15.620 And so all in all, you know, he did make mistakes.

00:29:18.080 But as I mentioned earlier, from each of those that I've mentioned, he learned his lesson.

00:29:22.020 So, from 1918, he returns after the First World War.

00:29:27.180 What happens then?

00:29:28.480 From being Minister of Munitions to the point that the First World War ended,

00:29:33.280 he then became Minister of War and Air as well.

00:29:36.700 And he was the father of the RAF.

00:29:38.820 So actually, the Royal Air Force was very much his idea.

00:29:42.600 And then after that, in 1924, he became the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

00:29:47.200 And he was not much of an economist, frankly, but nonetheless, he presided over the most difficult period

00:29:56.520 because it coincided with the outbreak of the general strike in 1926.

00:30:01.960 And he wanted to be as generous as possible to the mine workers who led that strike.

00:30:09.560 But nonetheless, it was a terribly difficult period.

00:30:12.580 By 1930, he was out of office.

00:30:16.920 The Conservatives had lost the subsequent general election.

00:30:20.800 And he fell out with the front bench, with the Conservative leadership over independence for India

00:30:28.140 and resigned from the front bench.

00:30:31.340 And so let's go into that, because obviously that is, you know, that's a huge part of the story here.

00:30:36.680 Where did he lie when it came to this particular issue?

00:30:39.960 He very much thought that the British should not move towards what's called dominion status,

00:30:45.960 which is essentially self-government for India.

00:30:48.140 He thought that India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire,

00:30:52.100 that if you gave the majority Hindu population of India essentially the power over all Indians, 0.83

00:31:02.700 then it would be disastrous for the Indian princes, which ruled about a third of India at the time.

00:31:09.460 Also very bad for the Muslim minority in India, and also bad for the untouchables, 1.00

00:31:15.020 who he feared would be kept down even more than they were by Indian society at the time.

00:31:23.620 And so he opposed it and did everything he could to stop Indian self-government, but failed.

00:31:30.200 And the Indian Self-Government Act of 1935 passed against his opposition.

00:31:38.080 But were his fears actually realised, and obviously it was inevitable that India was going to self-government,

00:31:43.740 but were his fears actually correct as to what would happen?

00:31:46.960 Well, if you look at Mr Modi's way of ruling India at the moment,

00:31:51.800 and especially where the princes, where the Muslims and where the untouchables are in Indian society, 0.92

00:31:57.320 actually Churchill might have had a bit of a point, frankly.

00:32:00.340 And Andrew, it strikes me that this isn't strictly a Churchill question,

00:32:03.880 but I think it's important to flesh this out for all of us, including myself, to understand.

00:32:08.200 Francis said something which may or may not be true, but Indians and self-governance was inevitable,

00:32:14.440 which begs the question really, why was the British Empire at this point starting to essentially decline

00:32:22.320 decline and all of these conversations about self-governance here, independence there?

00:32:27.880 Why were they taken off?

00:32:29.200 The major problem for the British Empire after the First World War was a financial one.

00:32:34.760 It was broke.

00:32:35.740 It had spent an enormous amount of money fighting that war.

00:32:40.320 And compared to countries like America, it had no resources.

00:32:45.300 It had sold off a lot of its assets during the war to continue fighting the war.

00:32:49.940 It was also morally demoralised because of the loss of an entire generation of essentially young men

00:32:58.700 who'd been killed, three quarters of a million of them, in the war.

00:33:03.840 It got bigger, actually, physically up until 1921, but it was hollowed out, essentially.

00:33:11.160 And then when the threats to India started, it seemed very much that the whole organisation 0.99

00:33:19.760 essentially was being run by, you know, more of a wilderness of mirrors, really,

00:33:25.940 than an empire of the kind that had been there 20 years previously.

00:33:31.300 Was there also a rising cynicism from the working classes to the upper classes

00:33:35.260 because of the debacle of the First World War, lions led by donkeys, etc.?

00:33:39.560 There was a very strong, yes.

00:33:40.860 That was an important aspect, was that although the actual officers in the trenches themselves

00:33:48.120 had been incredibly brave, and the working classes admired their officers of their own units,

00:33:54.860 who died in greater proportion than the working classes did in that war,

00:34:00.520 also the high officers, the generals, who had come up with the grand strategy were not respected

00:34:10.060 because of the disastrous grand strategy that was adopted.

00:34:14.360 Now, there are a lot of historians, and to an extent I'm amongst them,

00:34:18.460 that tries to look at any other kind of grand strategy that could have won that war, frankly.

00:34:23.760 But nonetheless, yes, there was a sense that the officer class had let the working classes down,

00:34:34.120 but not the officer class in the trenches, but the ones back in the chateau.

00:34:38.300 So the empire is morally weakened, financially bankrupt, not bankrupt, but...

00:34:46.440 And also, one other aspect of it, which I didn't mention, also strategically outmaneuvered,

00:34:52.180 because you have Japan in the Far East, Italy in the Mediterranean, and Germany,

00:34:58.360 all coming up in the 1930s, and all, of course, joining with each other in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1937,

00:35:07.480 and posing three separate threats to the British Empire in three separate geographical areas.

00:35:13.860 So it's a very difficult position. Churchill is in the Conservative government, but he resigns over India.

00:35:20.000 This is 1931, did you say?

00:35:21.640 1930.

00:35:22.520 1930. And this is just about Hitler and his Nazi party are about to take over in Germany. 0.61

00:35:30.560 So how does the next few years play out in the early 30s?

00:35:33.320 Well, the whole of the 1930s can be seen, really, as one decade of what he called the trawling tides of drift and surrender,

00:35:41.200 when the locusts ate. He was opposed to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

00:35:48.520 He made the most magnificent speeches, warning about exactly what was going to happen.

00:35:55.700 He tried to stop it from happening, and no one listened to him.

00:35:59.980 He was ridiculed. He was shouted down in the House of Commons.

00:36:03.260 He was attacked in the press. They tried to take away his seat. The Conservatives tried to deselect him for his parliamentary seat.

00:36:13.380 On the basis he was warmongering?

00:36:15.000 On the basis that he was warmongering, exactly.

00:36:17.520 And every single thing that he said turned out to be right, and everything that they said turned out to be wrong.

00:36:24.160 And you see that long time from the accession of Adolf Hitler to becoming the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933,

00:36:36.080 then through, obviously, the anti-Semitic laws that he passes, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936,

00:36:45.380 the Anschluss of 1938, the Munich crisis, of course, over the Sudetenland in 1938,

00:36:51.680 and then the horrors of marching into Prague in the March of 1939.

00:36:58.080 And by the end of 1939, after a whole decade of Churchill saying,

00:37:02.660 this is what is going to happen, finally, when he was proved right on the 15th of March 1939,

00:37:08.400 and everybody else was proved wrong, finally, the British people did actually start listening to Winston Churchill.

00:37:14.220 Andrew, I wanted to ask a question, which is, how many of those people were just incorrect and read the situation wrong,

00:37:23.500 which we can all do, and how many of them were Nazi sympathisers?

00:37:28.180 Not many Nazi sympathisers, frankly.

00:37:31.060 There were some, of course.

00:37:32.140 The British Union of Fascists was a party, but it was never an electoral force.

00:37:39.840 It never got anybody elected to Parliament, you know, under its own steam.

00:37:47.200 But a lot of people were good-natured people who hoped for the best.

00:37:53.040 They'd fought in the First World War and didn't want to see another war,

00:37:56.180 couldn't believe that the Germans would ever start another war.

00:38:00.000 They were people who couldn't believe that Hitler could be so evil as to want another war.

00:38:04.880 A lot of them were Christians who believed that the phrase appeasement was actually a positive thing. 0.83

00:38:12.720 There were people who thought that business was much more important

00:38:18.000 and the Germans would never go to war and destroy the capitalist economy and so on.

00:38:22.840 It was extraordinary, really, the number of people who were willing to just assume that the government was right 0.61

00:38:31.740 and that Winston Churchill was an insane warmonger.

00:38:36.460 Andrew, you alluded to it earlier, and being someone who was born in the Soviet Union,

00:38:42.480 I'm likely to bring this up naturally, but you mentioned Churchill's prescience about fascism

00:38:47.520 and the threat of Nazism in Germany.

00:38:49.700 And you also earlier talked about his presence when it comes to the other terrible ideology

00:38:55.100 that came out of the early 20th century.

00:38:58.220 During the 30s, the true horror of the communist regime in Soviet Russia

00:39:03.000 is starting to become difficult to ignore, let's put it like this.

00:39:07.840 And Churchill is one of the people who is openly speaking about this at the time, is he not?

00:39:11.920 Yeah.

00:39:12.080 And again, there are quite a lot of people here in England and in the West more broadly

00:39:17.460 who would quite like to ignore that.

00:39:19.420 That's right, exactly.

00:39:20.440 No, no.

00:39:20.840 He was the leading voice of anti-communism in British politics in the 1930s.

00:39:27.060 Some of his greatest speeches were given about the horrors of what had been unleashed by Lenin and Trotsky

00:39:36.360 and he personally attacked Stalin and so on.

00:39:39.460 And he was a great anti-communist.

00:39:47.060 And of course, this continued all the way up until he recognised that the greater threat,

00:39:54.920 the more immediate threat at least, was from, the more dangerous threat was from Hitler. 0.84

00:39:59.920 And at that point, he was in favour of having an alliance with the Russians.

00:40:04.780 But the trouble is that Poland was in between Russia and Germany.

00:40:10.300 And so the only way in which the Russians could be brought to bear in an anti-Nazi envelopment,

00:40:17.760 essentially, was if the Poles agreed to it, which of course they would not do.

00:40:22.240 They fought against the Russians in 1920 and 21.

00:40:24.500 And they didn't want Russian troops on their soil and understandably so when one sees the rest of European history. 0.97

00:40:31.840 So it was an incredibly difficult situation at the time.

00:40:35.860 But Churchill did foresee the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.

00:40:42.460 And of course, when Hitler did invade Russia, Churchill was the first person to say,

00:40:48.640 we must immediately ally with Russia, even though he knew that Stalin had done the most appalling crimes, 0.51

00:40:56.460 including, of course, killing the Polish officer corps at Katyn in 1940.

00:41:01.800 So he was very much a pragmatist.

00:41:03.880 He had to be. In wartime, realpolitik, if you're to survive, is the only way to go forward.

00:41:10.440 But to give him his due, of course, after the Second World War, he was also the first person to have the guts

00:41:16.100 to actually say that what Stalin was doing in Eastern Europe was a threat to democracy there.

00:41:23.260 And he was, in his great Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, on the 5th of March 1946,

00:41:29.340 the first person to actually warn against Stalin.

00:41:33.440 And let's just touch on Neville Chamberlain, because he's painted now as this, you know, 0.99

00:41:38.580 weak, myopic, slightly pathetic figure. Is that unfair? 0.98

00:41:42.500 Very unfair, yeah. He was a very tough and, in his day, incredibly popular politician.

00:41:48.900 He probably would have won a landslide victory at any time had he called a general election in 1939

00:41:55.660 or late 1938. He, as a domestic politician, had been a really tough minister in the government.

00:42:05.160 He'd been a senior minister for 20 years. He was the son of Joseph Chamberlain,

00:42:09.160 one of the great Victorian politicians. So, yes, no, it's wrong to think of him as some kind of weak,

00:42:15.240 vacillating character. He might have been better if he had been, by the way,

00:42:18.360 because he might have been able to have been pushed off the policy of appeasement,

00:42:22.640 which he clung on to even after it became obvious that it wasn't working.

00:42:29.180 When he came back from Munich and waved the piece of paper in the air,

00:42:34.960 he truly believed that he had personally, through his own diplomacy,

00:42:40.200 managed to save peace for his time and told the cabinet as much.

00:42:45.820 You know, he was a very vain man in that sense.

00:42:48.340 And delusional as well.

00:42:49.540 Well, ultimately, yes, because by the time of the move into Prague in March 1939,

00:43:00.020 he still had to be forced into giving the guarantee to Poland,

00:43:04.820 which they gave on the 1st of April 1939,

00:43:07.820 which, of course, was the trigger that started the Second World War.

00:43:11.180 So, Andrew, if he wasn't motivated by weakness,

00:43:14.180 what was at the basis of the policy of appeasement?

00:43:17.140 Well, first of all, it was the sense that we couldn't fight Italy, Japan and Germany 0.95

00:43:24.600 all at the same time without any allies.

00:43:27.420 The Americans were in full-on isolationist mode.

00:43:32.120 The America First movement was tremendously powerful at that time.

00:43:35.560 Sounds familiar.

00:43:37.220 The Russians at the time, of course, from the August of 1939 onwards,

00:43:43.100 were allied to the Germans.

00:43:44.960 The French didn't want to go to war at all.

00:43:49.920 And so we saw the strategic danger of actually going to war against three big powers

00:43:57.380 right the way around the world, from the Far East to the Channel,

00:44:02.540 essentially with no allies.

00:44:04.340 And so that was one of the major reasons behind appeasement.

00:44:07.860 The other one, and this we have to give Neville Chamberlain his due,

00:44:11.960 was that major advances were being made in terms of radar

00:44:16.740 and the latest types of hurricane and spitfire.

00:44:23.060 And we needed to make as many as we possibly could before war broke out.

00:44:27.300 And that period, the year between Munich and the outbreak of war,

00:44:31.920 between the September of 1938 and the September of 1939,

00:44:35.060 we did build enough hurricanes and spitfires to win the Battle of Britain in 1940.

00:44:42.600 Now, we didn't know that that was going to happen, of course.

00:44:44.720 It was pure luck, frankly.

00:44:46.760 But it was very much a plan to try to create as much as we could in terms of armaments.

00:44:54.800 And it's worth pointing out, of course,

00:44:56.580 that the Germans created much more in that year than we did.

00:44:59.520 But nonetheless, that was an important aspect of it as well.

00:45:02.760 So I have to say, I suddenly find myself rather persuaded by the argument for appeasement,

00:45:08.500 particularly on the first point.

00:45:09.740 If you've got a, yes, the British Empire, but as we've discussed,

00:45:12.720 bankrupt and morally quite weakened, no allies.

00:45:17.280 Well, no, the thing was that, of course, they should have got allies.

00:45:19.640 They should have done much more.

00:45:22.780 The Chamberlain government was totally uninterested in trying to persuade the Americans.

00:45:26.100 It was totally uninteresting in trying to get the Russians on board. 1.00

00:45:30.320 Now, that would have been difficult because the Russians wanted the Baltic states.

00:45:33.600 And we were in no position as a democracy to hand over the Baltic states

00:45:37.600 in the way that Hitler obviously could do. 0.82

00:45:40.020 But we should have been rearming so much earlier in the 1930s,

00:45:44.400 getting all the latest cutting edge weaponry

00:45:49.320 and also obviously making much more of a forward movement in Europe itself.

00:45:58.700 And we didn't send any troops to the European continent

00:46:04.740 until after the war had broken out.

00:46:06.580 Yes.

00:46:06.860 I guess where I was going with my question is,

00:46:09.040 I can see why maybe some of Churchill's arguments were falling on deaf ears

00:46:13.180 because the argument that we have no allies,

00:46:16.080 we're one, yes, empire, but we've got all these challenges

00:46:19.660 we're going to have to fight off.

00:46:20.900 It's much wiser to avoid a fight at any cost almost.

00:46:25.360 It must have been quite difficult for Churchill to try and make inroads against that.

00:46:29.040 It certainly was.

00:46:30.120 And the key moment, of course, comes in Munich

00:46:32.520 because had the Czechs fought in 1938

00:46:37.480 and the French and British invaded or attacked, at least, in the West,

00:46:43.020 firstly, there's a chance that Hitler might have fallen anyway.

00:46:46.460 Some generals said they were going to overthrow him.

00:46:49.500 Secondly, there's no certainty that he would have been able to have won that war,

00:46:55.260 a 1938 war.

00:46:56.940 By 1939 and certainly by 1940,

00:46:59.320 he had the entirety of the German Reich up to mobilisation point

00:47:04.720 and, of course, was able to steamroller Poland 0.99

00:47:07.740 and then in the May 1940, crush the British and French in the West.

00:47:12.820 Andrew, I got told this, and maybe this is completely wrong,

00:47:15.960 but Hitler also had quite a favourable impression of the British.

00:47:20.500 He quite liked us.

00:47:22.460 He ideologically...

00:47:24.320 I wouldn't brag about that, right?

00:47:25.740 No, no, it's important.

00:47:27.160 There's a very important aspect of this.

00:47:28.580 No, he didn't like us because he was jealous of our empire,

00:47:33.980 but he was impressed by our empire

00:47:36.100 and the way in which very, very small numbers of British troops

00:47:40.400 managed to essentially run the Indian empire.

00:47:44.740 There was only a few thousand, tens of thousands,

00:47:50.440 in an empire of 300 million people in India.

00:47:53.740 So it was, in that sense, he was impressed.

00:47:57.240 He was also impressed by the sheer scale and size of the empire,

00:48:00.960 which he would be because it was the largest empire the world had ever seen.

00:48:05.420 But he didn't like the British, no.

00:48:07.020 In fact, when he went on rants,

00:48:09.080 he would rant against, well, certainly Winston Churchill,

00:48:13.880 as you can imagine, but also the British as a people.

00:48:16.960 And so Neville Chamberlain's pursued this policy of appeasement.

00:48:22.520 It's becoming quite obvious to everybody that this isn't going to work.

00:48:26.680 How does his political career end,

00:48:28.700 considering he's this tough, uncompromising character?

00:48:31.840 Neville Chamberlain's career ended in a debate

00:48:34.500 called the Norway Debate

00:48:36.600 over the defeat that the British and French had suffered in Norway.

00:48:39.800 And it was held on the 7th and 8th of May 1940.

00:48:45.560 And because so few Conservatives and supporters,

00:48:49.900 natural supporters of the government,

00:48:51.540 actually turned up to vote for Chamberlain,

00:48:55.420 even though he did win a 81-seat majority,

00:49:00.740 usually the majority was much bigger than that.

00:49:03.080 And so he was forced to resign on the morning of the 10th of May 1940.

00:49:11.220 And Churchill became the Prime Minister on the 10th of May 1940.

00:49:15.480 He was called by King George VI to go to Buckingham Palace in the evening.

00:49:20.580 And that was the same day that Adolf Hitler, 0.92

00:49:23.680 purely by coincidence, invaded the Low Countries

00:49:28.040 and Holland and Belgium,

00:49:30.200 ultimately, obviously, also to invade France.

00:49:33.080 And he wasn't a young man, by the way,

00:49:35.180 when he became leader of this country, was he at that point?

00:49:39.180 He was 65, which is the retirement age.

00:49:43.040 And he said of that day, of that evening,

00:49:48.600 that he felt as if he were walking with destiny

00:49:50.840 and that all of his past life had been but a preparation

00:49:53.440 for this hour and for this trial.

00:49:55.540 And in a sense, it was.

00:49:56.740 All of the things he'd done in the First World War,

00:49:58.780 all of the amazing jobs that he'd held up till that point,

00:50:03.220 he held all but one of the great offices of state.

00:50:08.700 His whole career up until that point had, in a way, been a preparation.

00:50:16.560 And the extraordinary thing was that when he was only 16 years old

00:50:20.300 as a schoolboy at Harrow,

00:50:22.160 he told his best friend, Merland Evans,

00:50:24.600 there shall be great upheavals, great struggles in our lives.

00:50:29.080 I shall be called upon to save England and save the empire.

00:50:32.260 He said that when he was only 16.

00:50:34.640 And then half a century later, exactly that happened.

00:50:37.420 So, I mean, what a story.

00:50:41.080 I mean, it sounds like something out of a film, really,

00:50:43.200 which is why so many people have made movies and TV series about him.

00:50:47.920 So he's 65 years old.

00:50:49.860 He assumes the mantle of leader.

00:50:52.240 Britain, to be honest, it doesn't look like we're going to win.

00:50:56.800 No, it looks very much like we're going to lose.

00:50:58.680 In the first two weeks, we are pushed off the continent.

00:51:03.600 The German blitzkrieg, a completely new form of warfare,

00:51:07.420 in which their bombers and their tanks and their infantry

00:51:12.940 all work together in a seamless hole

00:51:15.840 to cut through the Ardennes

00:51:18.060 and essentially get to the channeled ports

00:51:21.040 by the 20th of May 1940

00:51:23.700 and force the British Expeditionary Force

00:51:28.440 to re-embark at Dunkirk,

00:51:31.520 very nearly captures the whole of the...

00:51:33.260 Hitler could have captured the whole of the British Expeditionary Force

00:51:35.960 if he hadn't executed his halt order of the 24th of May.

00:51:41.220 And by the 4th of June,

00:51:42.760 the British Expeditionary Force,

00:51:44.580 minus 40,000 men who are captured,

00:51:47.020 are back in Britain.

00:51:48.280 Again, the Russians are allied to the Germans.

00:51:51.600 The Americans aren't involved. 0.98

00:51:52.900 The French have essentially been knocked out of the war.

00:51:55.060 We look as though we've lost.

00:51:56.120 And what sustained him,

00:51:59.580 and I think I know the answer to this question,

00:52:01.340 through those incredibly dark moments

00:52:04.060 when it looked like Britain was going to fall?

00:52:06.800 His self-belief.

00:52:07.920 His belief in destiny.

00:52:09.180 Not just his own personal destiny,

00:52:11.180 but national destiny as well.

00:52:13.000 He believed that Britain was

00:52:15.140 was specifically going to see it through and to win.

00:52:20.880 He had a belief in himself and his country

00:52:23.980 that was not going to be essentially affected

00:52:28.940 by the situation on the ground.

00:52:30.860 He made speeches giving the British people reason to hope.

00:52:36.440 Frankly, they weren't great reasons

00:52:38.260 when one looks at them logically and rationally,

00:52:40.700 but it wasn't a logical and rational moment, frankly.

00:52:43.640 It was one in which you had to have self-belief.

00:52:46.620 And he did have that.

00:52:48.400 And one of the things we haven't touched on so far,

00:52:50.340 but I think it's the right moment to touch on,

00:52:53.060 is you've actually talked about him

00:52:54.660 having different roles within government

00:52:56.620 prior to this moment,

00:52:58.120 in which he actually does very well.

00:53:00.380 So he's clearly a competent,

00:53:02.160 not just leader who gives speeches and inspires people,

00:53:05.760 but actually competent at administration

00:53:07.740 and management and running departments.

00:53:10.260 Why is that?

00:53:11.300 Why is he so good?

00:53:12.140 Well, absolutely.

00:53:13.520 He'd run huge departments.

00:53:15.140 The Ministry of Munitions

00:53:16.120 was the biggest government department in the world

00:53:18.980 at the time of the number of people.

00:53:22.280 It had well over one and a half million people working for it.

00:53:26.380 He was Chancellor of the Exchequer

00:53:28.880 and therefore in charge of the entire British economy

00:53:31.020 for five years.

00:53:32.200 You know, these are big areas.

00:53:34.360 The First Lord of the Admiralty at the time

00:53:37.080 with the British Navy

00:53:37.860 was easily the biggest Navy in the world as well.

00:53:42.020 So he was good at these big things.

00:53:44.540 And the reason was that he was a real micromanager.

00:53:48.340 He got down into the basics of everything.

00:53:52.120 He would visit the depots constantly.

00:53:55.520 He would meet people below the top level.

00:53:58.260 So he actually knew what people on the shop floor

00:54:02.480 were thinking and saying.

00:54:06.220 He was somebody who was so energetic,

00:54:08.560 you know, every morning bounced out of bed early

00:54:10.720 in order to get the job done.

00:54:13.860 And this was partly, obviously, because of his ambition.

00:54:15.840 He wanted to do well in each of his jobs

00:54:17.300 and therefore get promoted.

00:54:19.320 But also because he was a total perfectionist

00:54:22.480 when it came to the duties that he was given.

00:54:25.980 And was he a good people person?

00:54:28.060 Oh, wonderful.

00:54:28.840 Actually wonderful.

00:54:29.440 He had any number of sort of top tips

00:54:32.000 for how to get on with people.

00:54:36.920 He was immensely charming.

00:54:39.700 Very funny man.

00:54:41.580 And so he was able to put people at their calm.

00:54:47.540 He was very, very calm in crises as well,

00:54:50.820 which people hugely appreciated,

00:54:53.680 especially considering how many crises he was involved in

00:54:56.240 in his life.

00:54:58.820 He was a very much, a people person

00:55:02.680 is the exact right way of putting it.

00:55:04.920 Yeah, he would, if he felt that people weren't connecting

00:55:08.740 with each other, he would make sure that they turned up.

00:55:11.580 He'd give parties.

00:55:12.560 He would give them Swedish milk punch,

00:55:15.460 which is a rather disgusting sounding drink.

00:55:17.180 But nonetheless, it was something that he would give them

00:55:21.380 and he would make sure that people met other people

00:55:26.180 important for them and so on.

00:55:28.020 He was very, very good when it comes to everything

00:55:30.060 to do with networking.

00:55:31.260 That's very interesting.

00:55:32.000 He was a connector.

00:55:33.140 So how does he bring this to bear?

00:55:35.260 Britain looks like it's about to lose.

00:55:38.560 The British Expeditionary Force has been forced back

00:55:41.100 to Britain having lost tens of thousands of soldiers captured.

00:55:47.280 No allies to speak of at the time.

00:55:49.260 America's not involved in the war.

00:55:51.400 Germany seems incredibly powerful with its new tactics.

00:55:56.060 The Soviet Union is maybe not allied.

00:55:58.860 It is allied.

00:55:59.700 Yeah.

00:56:00.040 Maybe non-aggressions.

00:56:02.440 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:02.720 But anyway, it doesn't really matter too much.

00:56:04.420 But it's supplying grain and oil and all sorts of other things.

00:56:09.300 What does Churchill do?

00:56:12.220 What do you do?

00:56:12.860 I think one very important point to point out is, of course,

00:56:16.720 that although we don't have foreign allies,

00:56:19.880 we do have the empire.

00:56:21.700 So we have the millions of people who join the Indian Army,

00:56:27.300 which becomes the largest volunteer army in the history of mankind,

00:56:31.140 still is to this day.

00:56:33.240 We have the Australians who are superb fighters,

00:56:38.180 as are the New Zealanders.

00:56:39.780 The Canadians, A, superb fighters,

00:56:43.320 but also are able to ship huge amounts of grain and so on

00:56:47.840 across the Atlantic to Britain to keep feeding Britain.

00:56:53.820 All three of those, sorry, four of those,

00:56:56.780 and also troops from the Caribbean countries,

00:57:00.340 fight in North Africa and in various other parts of the world,

00:57:04.820 Burma and so on.

00:57:05.760 And finally, also a fight in Italy and Europe.

00:57:11.760 So the empire is a huge, huge supporter of Britain

00:57:16.740 in its hour of need in 1940 and 41,

00:57:19.560 whilst Britain is fighting for its life.

00:57:22.640 And how willing are these?

00:57:24.220 We've alluded to the fact that by this point,

00:57:26.240 the empire is starting to break down

00:57:28.280 and it's inevitable that it will collapse eventually,

00:57:31.540 as it does.

00:57:32.060 And how willing are the Indians to go and sign up 1.00

00:57:35.100 and fight in a war that...

00:57:36.380 This is the amazing thing.

00:57:37.600 They're incredibly willing.

00:57:39.280 The New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians

00:57:43.220 all declare war on the same day

00:57:45.980 that the war breaks out, 3rd of September.

00:57:49.600 The Maoris, for example, have their chiefs come together

00:57:53.020 and declare war against Germany,

00:57:54.440 even though they're on the other side of the world from Germany.

00:57:59.000 The Indians, of course, it's via the Viceroy, 1.00

00:58:03.600 but nobody forces them to sign up

00:58:06.420 and they do so in their millions to fight.

00:58:10.040 And this is 18 months or so

00:58:12.480 before the Japanese attack in Pearl Harbor.

00:58:15.960 So, yes, it's a great imperial family, essentially,

00:58:20.940 that comes together to try to fight the horrors of fascism.

00:58:26.940 And how much of that was a loyalty to Britain?

00:58:29.660 And how much of that was a look over

00:58:33.120 at what Germany were doing and going,

00:58:35.740 this is an evil that needs to be defeated?

00:58:38.020 Both.

00:58:38.740 Absolutely, yeah.

00:58:39.800 And of course it would be both.

00:58:41.900 You know, that makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

00:58:43.600 It's, if up until Munich,

00:58:48.340 a lot of the rest of the empire

00:58:51.580 wasn't interested in getting involved in a European war.

00:58:55.260 But once it became clear from Munich onwards,

00:58:57.780 and especially as I keep coming back,

00:58:59.460 this idea of the remilitarization of Prague,

00:59:03.580 that moment where he moves into Bohemia and Moravia

00:59:06.640 and then takes the whole of the rest of Czechoslovakia

00:59:10.100 in the march of 1939,

00:59:11.340 that is the clear signal to the whole world

00:59:14.600 that Hitler is not just interested 0.97

00:59:16.520 in trying to get Germans back into the Reich,

00:59:19.760 as he had been claiming for years,

00:59:22.160 that all he wanted to do was rip up the Versailles Treaty.

00:59:25.240 No, he was taking Slavs into the Reich as well.

00:59:29.120 And so that was the moment at which

00:59:30.740 the Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and so on 0.55

00:59:33.340 all recognised that Hitler was exactly the kind of evil conqueror 0.92

00:59:39.520 that Winston Churchill had been mourning about.

00:59:42.600 So they then started to fight the Germans.

00:59:48.580 At what point did we see the Germans start to get pushed back

00:59:53.040 as if it looked like it was a more fair fight

00:59:55.560 and actually defeat didn't look inevitable?

00:59:58.940 Well, the first moment, of course,

01:00:00.700 was the victory in the Battle of Britain.

01:00:02.140 On the 15th of September 1940,

01:00:05.040 it became clear that the RAF had won the battle against the Luftwaffe

01:00:09.720 and that the invasion, therefore, wasn't going to take place.

01:00:16.160 We didn't know it wasn't going to take place,

01:00:18.140 really, until the June of 1941,

01:00:19.900 when Hitler invaded Russia.

01:00:23.000 But it became pretty clear

01:00:25.380 because you can't invade across 22 miles of salt water

01:00:29.480 unless you have air superiority.

01:00:32.100 We established that, obviously,

01:00:33.740 in Operation Overlord in June 1944,

01:00:36.620 going in the other direction.

01:00:38.300 And they didn't have operational air superiority

01:00:42.500 because they lost the Battle of Britain.

01:00:44.260 That was the first point.

01:00:45.380 But then it's not until the November of 1942

01:00:49.260 so a full two and a half years after the Battle of Britain

01:00:53.680 that the Germans start to get seriously defeated on land.

01:00:59.100 And that happens in North Africa

01:01:00.600 at the Battle of El Alamein at the end of 1942.

01:01:05.460 And how much of that was because the Americans then got involved?

01:01:11.000 A lot, because we were very fortunate

01:01:12.840 that the Americans gave us, essentially,

01:01:17.040 the Sherman tanks with which we fought

01:01:21.460 the Battle of El Alamein.

01:01:25.140 And also, of course, in the same month, November 1942,

01:01:29.000 the Americans also landed a quarter of a million men

01:01:31.780 in northwest Africa, in Morocco

01:01:34.460 and elsewhere on the northwest coasts there.

01:01:39.560 I didn't know that.

01:01:40.200 But America's not involved in the war

01:01:41.940 as a combatant at this point, is it?

01:01:43.360 In November 1942, it is.

01:01:46.060 So, yes, it goes...

01:01:48.180 Oh, of course, because by this point it's been attacked.

01:01:50.060 Yes.

01:01:50.820 Well, this is the amazing thing about America,

01:01:53.740 is that although it wasn't attacked by Germany...

01:01:56.740 Yes.

01:01:57.780 ...and Hitler didn't declare war against America

01:02:01.000 until the 11th of December 1941,

01:02:03.920 four days after Pearl Harbor,

01:02:05.840 the Roosevelt administration took the most incredibly

01:02:09.320 statesman-like decision to put Germany first.

01:02:12.260 It's called the Germany first policy. 0.52

01:02:14.840 And what they decided to do was to,

01:02:18.360 even though they hadn't been attacked by Germany,

01:02:21.760 they'd only been attacked by Japan in the Pacific,

01:02:25.000 they nonetheless had 70% of their resources

01:02:28.660 concentrated on defeating Germany.

01:02:31.880 And this is because of great statesmanship

01:02:35.640 by the Roosevelt administration,

01:02:37.580 by General Marshall,

01:02:39.140 by General Eisenhower and others,

01:02:40.940 who came up with what's called the Germany first policy.

01:02:44.140 And the fact is that under Clausewitz

01:02:47.300 and the great military thinkers,

01:02:49.000 if you're attacked by two enemies,

01:02:50.880 you take out the strongest one first.

01:02:53.600 And Hitler was much stronger than Japan. 0.86

01:02:55.420 Whenever I think about Pearl Harbor, 0.90

01:02:59.080 I always see it as a ridiculous thing to do by the Japanese. 1.00

01:03:05.180 You've got the Americans.

01:03:06.960 They're not involved at this stage.

01:03:09.640 They're a superpower.

01:03:10.420 Why are you going to attack them?

01:03:14.620 Because of the oil embargo.

01:03:17.200 The fear was that Japan was essentially,

01:03:21.200 the Japanese empire was essentially

01:03:22.420 just going to run out of oil.

01:03:23.940 And the way to smash that was to take on the Americans 1.00

01:03:27.620 and steal the oil of the Netherlands East Indies,

01:03:32.880 Dutch East Indies.

01:03:34.220 And the only way to do that was to attack America. 1.00

01:03:36.900 It was, of course, an ultimately incredibly stupid 1.00

01:03:41.240 and suicidal thing to have done 1.00

01:03:43.160 because you can't invade America.

01:03:45.720 America is an uninvadeable country. 1.00

01:03:48.100 And that's also why it was so stupid 1.00

01:03:49.880 and indeed literally suicidal 1.00

01:03:52.140 for Adolf Hitler to declare war on America

01:03:56.300 on the 11th of December, 1941.

01:03:58.700 But both of these countries did that

01:04:01.000 and look what happened to them.

01:04:03.540 And Andrew, coming back to Churchill,

01:04:05.500 I imagine when he's taking over in 1940,

01:04:09.220 the war looks like it's unwinnable at this point

01:04:12.380 or close to.

01:04:13.180 He's giving all these speeches.

01:04:14.380 He's trying to marshal the defence of Britain.

01:04:17.400 Number one at the top of his list

01:04:18.960 or certainly close to it would have been,

01:04:20.900 how do I get the Americans to help us?

01:04:23.540 That's right.

01:04:23.980 And the Americans did help enormously.

01:04:26.260 They sent over in the May and June of 1940,

01:04:30.480 in the summer of 1940,

01:04:32.080 huge numbers of rifles,

01:04:33.380 millions of rounds of ammunition,

01:04:36.100 an enormous amount of military help.

01:04:38.580 And then they passed the Lend-Lease Act,

01:04:43.400 which allowed us to buy enormous amounts of munitions

01:04:46.440 from them as well.

01:04:48.680 So the Americans did help.

01:04:50.340 What they obviously didn't want to do at that time

01:04:54.220 was to actually get involved in the hot war,

01:04:58.080 in the fighting,

01:04:59.140 because they hadn't been attacked.

01:05:02.300 And yet, when Adolf Hitler did declare war on them,

01:05:06.680 then they took this incredible decision,

01:05:10.120 this Germany First decision,

01:05:11.300 and they landed all those men,

01:05:14.320 quarter of a million men,

01:05:15.580 in the Western theatre,

01:05:17.840 as opposed to just concentrating on the Japanese.

01:05:21.080 Of course, they did fight back very much against the Japanese. 0.95

01:05:23.880 You have Guadalcanal,

01:05:24.920 you have the Battle of Midway by 1942.

01:05:27.700 But the lion's share of the American resources

01:05:30.720 goes to fighting Hitler in the West.

01:05:33.060 So, was Churchill happy with the situation

01:05:37.900 where he was getting supplies,

01:05:39.440 you've got Lend-Lease,

01:05:40.260 or was he banging down the door

01:05:42.260 trying to get the Americans 0.98

01:05:43.420 to actually get kinetically involved?

01:05:46.300 Churchill very much wanted the Americans 0.98

01:05:48.460 to be kinetically involved, of course,

01:05:50.660 but he recognised that he couldn't affect

01:05:53.700 internal American domestic political opinion

01:05:57.280 beyond making speeches to the Americans,

01:06:00.800 constantly getting his ambassador

01:06:03.660 to try to encourage the Americans

01:06:06.780 to give more help,

01:06:08.700 and making sure that Americans saw the war

01:06:12.880 in the correct ideological terms,

01:06:14.740 which was obviously with civilisation

01:06:18.520 and democracy on one side

01:06:20.600 against fascism and, frankly, evil on the other.

01:06:24.200 When you tell this story about Churchill,

01:06:28.580 he was 65 years old,

01:06:30.620 the toll it must have taken on him,

01:06:33.900 both physical and emotional,

01:06:36.280 must have been almost unbearable.

01:06:41.900 Well, that's right.

01:06:42.520 I mean, he was 65 years old

01:06:43.860 when he became Prime Minister in 1940,

01:06:45.580 so he was in his early 70s

01:06:47.200 by the time of the end of the war.

01:06:51.580 And he was extraordinarily brave

01:06:54.700 during the Second World War.

01:06:55.700 He'd go up onto the roofs of Whitehall,

01:07:00.820 indeed a building that's just behind us there,

01:07:03.460 the Air Ministry.

01:07:04.480 He'd go up onto the roof during the Blitz.

01:07:06.660 He undertook 110,000 miles of flights

01:07:10.960 outside the United Kingdom,

01:07:14.240 not just flights,

01:07:14.980 also journeys by ship,

01:07:17.240 outside the United Kingdom,

01:07:18.440 sometimes within the radius of the Luftwaffe.

01:07:21.160 However, he had four separate bouts of pneumonia,

01:07:25.600 one of which very nearly killed him in Carthage in 1943.

01:07:29.880 So he really was showing tremendous physical courage.

01:07:34.100 But that is Winston Churchill, you see.

01:07:35.920 This is the great thing.

01:07:36.760 He showed as much physical courage

01:07:39.180 as he had shown moral courage throughout his career.

01:07:42.260 And let's touch on the things that people say about him,

01:07:46.960 that he was an alcoholic

01:07:47.920 and he was permanently drunk, etc.

01:07:51.100 I can't believe that's true.

01:07:53.000 Well, no, you couldn't really have run

01:07:54.760 the Second World War, frankly,

01:07:56.580 and gone to all of these

01:07:58.940 and led these meetings of the cabinet

01:08:01.940 and the war cabinet if you were permanently drunk.

01:08:04.160 He did drink a hell of a lot.

01:08:06.440 That's one thing to remember.

01:08:08.080 He had a rhinocerone capacity for alcohol.

01:08:11.200 He would drink most lunchtimes

01:08:15.140 and certainly most dinnertimes.

01:08:17.280 He didn't get completely plastered,

01:08:19.080 but he did have whiskies and sodas

01:08:21.720 that would start at about six o'clock in the evening

01:08:23.880 and then go through on.

01:08:26.100 But his private secretary,

01:08:28.860 Anthony Montague Brown,

01:08:30.380 told me that these were what he called mouthwash.

01:08:33.680 So very, very little whisky,

01:08:35.800 large amounts of soda.

01:08:38.300 There was a friend of his called C.P. Scott

01:08:40.580 who said that Winston Churchill

01:08:42.140 couldn't have been an alcoholic

01:08:43.340 because no alcoholic could have drunk that much.

01:08:47.440 That's very interesting.

01:08:48.820 I mean, I guess the obvious counterpoint

01:08:50.940 to your argument that he couldn't have

01:08:52.560 chaired all those meetings, etc.,

01:08:53.980 was that Hitler apparently was on all sorts of drugs

01:08:56.600 the entire war.

01:08:57.860 And also it was T-Total, of course.

01:09:00.120 So Hitler was on the other end of the spectrum,

01:09:04.100 as it were.

01:09:05.780 Hitler would... 0.97

01:09:07.640 It was very interesting the different ways

01:09:09.340 that they acted.

01:09:11.800 Hitler, at the beginning of meetings,

01:09:14.360 would set out what he wanted the meeting to discuss.

01:09:17.380 Then he would listen quite a lot.

01:09:19.180 He was quite a good listener, in fact,

01:09:20.640 we know from the Fuhrer conferences,

01:09:22.860 which were all taken down by the stenographers,

01:09:26.200 every word,

01:09:27.480 at the Wolfschanter in eastern Prussia.

01:09:30.560 But then at the end,

01:09:31.360 he would sum up and not change his mind at all.

01:09:33.720 He would have listened to his generals,

01:09:35.660 but then he would not have taken their point of view.

01:09:39.040 With Churchill, it was very different.

01:09:41.060 He didn't start off saying what he wanted.

01:09:43.440 He would listen to what they have to say.

01:09:45.640 And if the arguments were better than his arguments,

01:09:48.180 he would change his mind.

01:09:49.120 And that obviously is the much more democratic,

01:09:51.920 much more grown-up, frankly,

01:09:53.900 and much more useful

01:09:54.960 and much more successful way

01:09:57.180 of going about a meeting.

01:09:59.040 Well, quite.

01:09:59.480 You mentioned that one of the lessons he learned

01:10:02.560 from his earlier mistakes

01:10:03.760 was that his opinion wasn't always the right one

01:10:06.280 and that he ought to listen to the professionals,

01:10:08.240 particularly when it comes to matters of war.

01:10:10.360 How did that manifest itself during World War II?

01:10:12.920 Oh, well, he would have some of the chiefs of staff

01:10:16.000 sit across the table from him.

01:10:18.060 Again, not very far from here,

01:10:19.800 just over there in the cabinet war rooms.

01:10:22.280 And they would, General Alan Brooke,

01:10:24.940 the chief of the Imperial General Staff,

01:10:26.480 would lean across and break pencils in half,

01:10:28.760 saying, no, I disagree with you, Prime Minister.

01:10:31.780 But they would have these arguments.

01:10:33.700 Sometimes they would be roused.

01:10:35.060 Sometimes they would bang the table.

01:10:36.740 Sometimes Winston Churchill would burst into tears

01:10:38.880 if he didn't get his way.

01:10:40.420 But if the chiefs of staff all stuck to their original beliefs,

01:10:45.400 as they did over, say, the Sumatra plan of March 1943

01:10:50.040 and various Norwegian plans as well,

01:10:53.340 and they refused to change their minds,

01:10:55.880 then Churchill never overruled them.

01:10:59.860 And this turned out to be the best thing,

01:11:02.300 you know, because they did not make any huge errors.

01:11:05.580 Of course, there were mistakes and defeats and problems and so on.

01:11:10.700 But the chiefs of staff overall didn't make the kind of errors

01:11:14.160 that they would have made if they had been putty in Churchill's hands.

01:11:18.840 And as we move towards the end of the war,

01:11:20.920 when we saw the firebombing of Dresden,

01:11:24.720 how much was Churchill involved in those decisions?

01:11:27.840 Well, he was one of the people, of course.

01:11:30.540 That was an RAF bomber command decision,

01:11:33.900 which was essentially okayed by the chiefs of staff.

01:11:39.180 The Dresden one in particular on the 13th and 14th of February 1945

01:11:45.080 was an easy decision for the chiefs of staff to take

01:11:49.820 because the Russians had asked bomber command

01:11:53.040 to smash the railway nodes that were bringing German forces back 0.95

01:11:58.300 from the west to shore up the defence of Nazi positions in the east.

01:12:05.840 And so to attack the railway sidings,

01:12:09.900 which is what they did in Dresden,

01:12:12.520 was not a difficult decision to take.

01:12:15.180 The reason that the losses were so high,

01:12:17.300 and by the way, they're nothing like as high

01:12:19.100 as pro-Nazi historians have made out.

01:12:23.580 They're much more like 20,000 rather than 200,000 people killed

01:12:27.400 on those raids.

01:12:29.040 The reason they were so high was because the Gauleiters of Dresden 0.99

01:12:32.760 had not prepared proper defences in Dresden.

01:12:38.800 But nonetheless, I guess what France's question is getting at,

01:12:42.040 and this is relevant to a more modern context

01:12:44.800 when we see conflicts that are ongoing currently

01:12:47.160 where there's a constant discussion about civilian casualties

01:12:50.480 and war and so on.

01:12:52.720 In the last year and a half of the war,

01:12:55.020 the Allies, and Britain in particular,

01:12:57.260 dropped a hell of a lot of munitions on Nazi Germany.

01:13:02.200 To what extent was there a moral debate

01:13:05.960 within the British government and armed forces about that,

01:13:09.120 or was it just seen as, look, we've got to win the war,

01:13:11.280 this is what you do when you win?

01:13:12.180 There was a moral debate.

01:13:13.920 The Church of England had several bishops who were opposed to it

01:13:17.680 and who said so in debates in the House of Lords.

01:13:21.680 This got very little traction amongst the public.

01:13:24.120 The public, frankly, who had taken the Blitz, of course,

01:13:27.780 back in 1940-41 and in the V2 attacks in 1944,

01:13:33.040 were taking it all over again.

01:13:35.060 They were very much in favour of giving it back to the Germans.

01:13:39.600 As it was, we lost over 50,000 killed civilians

01:13:44.280 and the Germans lost half a million.

01:13:47.160 So we gave it back 10 times.

01:13:50.040 And that, tragically, is war.

01:13:52.400 That's what happens in war when you start a war

01:13:54.500 and you try to kill as many innocent civilians as possible.

01:14:00.880 I mean, obviously, there is a war going on at the moment in Gaza

01:14:04.080 where much the same kind of thing is happening.

01:14:07.560 Very many more civilians being killed

01:14:10.460 than originally were killed by the aggressors.

01:14:13.400 But it's absolutely essential to remember who were the aggressors.

01:14:17.120 Well, quite.

01:14:17.740 And it's one of the reasons I brought in the modern situation.

01:14:20.740 However, I'm just curious.

01:14:22.640 And to think about the decision, you alluded to the fact

01:14:29.480 that the general public, frankly, wanted to give it back to the Germans.

01:14:33.760 Was there an element of the aerial bombardment of Germany

01:14:37.160 that was about punishment?

01:14:39.880 Not really, no.

01:14:42.320 That was there.

01:14:44.280 Of course it was.

01:14:45.140 But actually, when you look at the graphs of the increase in munitions productions,

01:14:51.660 by the August of 1943, all of the graphs come, they basically plateau off.

01:14:58.620 Because the Allied bombing campaign, it wasn't just the RAF, of course,

01:15:02.800 it was also the US AAF, are able to take out the factories necessary

01:15:10.440 in so many cases that mean that, yes, the Germans continue 0.99

01:15:15.000 to increase military production, but nothing like the same extent

01:15:20.040 as in 1941, 1942, and the early part of 1943.

01:15:24.720 So it really is an attempt to hit the wall-bearing factories, 1.00

01:15:29.060 the oil refineries, the tank production factories,

01:15:33.460 and they're very successful in that.

01:15:34.860 Was it seen really as a way of just expediting the end of this conflict?

01:15:41.340 Precisely.

01:15:41.920 You try and shorten the war by any means possible.

01:15:45.500 The RAF and the US AAF believe that they could actually win the war

01:15:49.400 just by smashing German cities. 0.95

01:15:51.760 And if you also, what was called, it's a rather horrible phrase,

01:15:55.340 but nonetheless, sort of bloodless phrase, de-house,

01:15:59.200 but if you also, at the same time as hitting the factories,

01:16:02.940 de-house the civilian population, you make it much more difficult

01:16:06.940 for them also to work in the factories to produce the necessary munitions

01:16:12.080 for the Germans to carry on fighting.

01:16:13.960 So it was just a very simple and effective way of bringing the country

01:16:17.200 to its knees?

01:16:18.060 Yes.

01:16:18.660 And it did it extremely successfully.

01:16:20.720 And if we had not done it, you could well have found that the Germans 1.00

01:16:25.460 could have carried on fighting for many months, indeed possibly even years longer,

01:16:30.880 and if that had happened, many more millions of people would have died.

01:16:34.580 And at what point did they find out about the concentration camps?

01:16:40.760 Relatively late on.

01:16:42.800 There were overflights, of course, where reconnaissance planes were able to take,

01:16:50.160 as we discovered after the war, a very good photograph of the actual ramp at Auschwitz.

01:16:56.260 There's a photograph, if you visited Auschwitz today, you see this Allied photograph.

01:17:03.960 But at the time, they didn't know what it was, tragically.

01:17:06.920 Then there were some people in 1942 who actually came back, very, very brave Poles

01:17:13.400 that came back to explain what was going on.

01:17:16.380 Certainly by 1944, by the time of the mass movement of Hungarians to Auschwitz,

01:17:24.340 the Western Allies had a pretty good idea that something truly monstrous was taking place.

01:17:31.120 Winston Churchill said to Anthony Eden, you know, invoke me if necessary,

01:17:35.740 but we need to bomb the railways going from Hungary to Auschwitz.

01:17:40.880 But the trouble is that bombing a railway is very difficult,

01:17:43.780 as we've discovered at Dresden, apart from anything else.

01:17:47.040 It's a really tricky thing to do because it's in a straight line.

01:17:52.800 And so what happened essentially was that the Americans didn't want to undertake

01:17:58.760 the daylight bombings, highly loss-producing, and the RAF used to bomb at night.

01:18:06.720 So tragically, that was not done.

01:18:10.320 And so we're going to the bombings of Dresden.

01:18:14.140 Was that the one thing that really ended the Nazi regime,

01:18:19.020 or were there other factors involved as well?

01:18:20.800 No, no, no, no. The thing that ended the Nazi regime was D-Day in the West, 0.80

01:18:26.360 where you have a million men by D plus 30 landing on in Western Europe,

01:18:32.580 and Operation Bagration in the East, where in July and August of 1944,

01:18:40.940 the Red Army kills, captures or wounds over half a million German soldiers,

01:18:47.400 510,000 German soldiers. And then it smashes essentially Army Group Center

01:18:53.060 in Belarus and marches on to Berlin. The war was not won by the combined bomber offensive,

01:19:02.820 although that did help enormously. It was won by fighting on the ground in Europe,

01:19:08.380 extirpating the Nazi regime in Germany.

01:19:11.340 Well, I'm glad you said that because my Soviet ancestors would not accept 1.00

01:19:14.440 the telling of the story of France's attempts. And in fact, there are historians who've argued

01:19:18.700 that really Germany lost the war in the attempt to capture Moscow, which failed and stalled.

01:19:25.580 Yeah, I mean, it's a very interesting historical discussion. I go into this in my book,

01:19:31.440 The Storm of War. Is it the failure to capture Moscow in the October and November of 1941?

01:19:39.860 You could argue that it's Stalingrad, of course, between August 1942 and the fall in the February

01:19:48.460 of 1943. Some would argue that Hitler's counterattack at Kursk in the Kursk salient in the July of 1943,

01:19:58.860 and the failure of that, is the key moment. By the time of Operation Bagration,

01:20:03.920 you know, the German armies very much are on the retreat. But yeah, your Russian ancestors can take 0.96

01:20:11.960 great pride because of the five, for every five Germans killed in combat, by which I don't mean

01:20:18.900 bomb from the air, not that half a million figure we mentioned earlier, but the half a million,

01:20:24.880 sorry, for every five Germans killed on a battlefield, four died on the Eastern Front.

01:20:30.400 And it cost the Russians some 27 million people.

01:20:33.600 Exactly. And the reason I bring it up is, I imagine that for Churchill, the pragmatic necessity

01:20:41.080 of doing a deal with the devil, Joseph Stalin, would have been simultaneously a very difficult 0.66

01:20:47.900 and a very simple decision at once. Is that fair to say?

01:20:50.940 Yes, that is actually. The moment that he heard of Hitler's invasion of Russia,

01:20:56.600 Operation Barbarossa on the 22nd of June 1941, he immediately went to the House of Commons

01:21:03.180 and declared the alliance with the Soviet Union. I mean, it's an amazing thing for him to do.

01:21:10.200 This man who had been a powerful, the most powerful anti-communist advocate since 1917,

01:21:17.360 since the Russian Revolution, comes out and says, I would, in fact, he makes a joke of it,

01:21:22.260 saying that he would make a positive reference to the devil in the House of Commons if the devil were

01:21:29.680 to invade Russia. And he goes to the House of Commons and says that if Hitler invaded hell,

01:21:38.520 then he would make a positive reference to Satan in the House of Commons. So he had this very much

01:21:46.160 this sense that he puts his country's best interests first and swallows essentially for the remainder of

01:21:56.180 the war his hatred of communism and is right to do so because, of course, the most important thing

01:22:03.120 is to defeat Nazis.

01:22:04.360 And the reason I bring that up is that I think most even people like us who are not well educated in

01:22:10.640 history will be familiar with towards the end of World War II, Germany's being enveloped from both

01:22:17.160 sides and eventually succumbs, Hitler kills himself on the bone, blah, blah, blah, blah. 0.52

01:22:20.700 What's interesting to me is there must have been a calculation at some point where Churchill and

01:22:26.600 the Americans would have gone, we're going to win this war. And then we've got another problem,

01:22:33.100 which is we've won this war with Joseph Stalin, with whom we've had to do a deal with the devil, 0.57

01:22:37.920 and now the devil is in the heart of Europe.

01:22:40.780 Well, that comes by the Yalta Conference, of course, of January and February 1945. So they

01:22:48.680 agree essentially to believe Stalin's lies about the integrity and independence of Poland. That's one 0.97

01:22:58.540 of the things they need to do essentially if they're to keep the alliance together until the moment when

01:23:05.240 the Germans are ultimately defeated in May of 1945. It's a very difficult moment. You can argue,

01:23:14.560 and historians do, that they were being sort of deliberately naive, or they were just following

01:23:21.960 realpolitik, which is what I believe. You know, if you've got an alliance with somebody who is worse

01:23:28.400 than the person you've got the alliance with, then you have to see that alliance through.

01:23:32.780 Because I guess the reason I'm bringing this up is, I'm just curious, as a historian, what other

01:23:37.760 options you think there may have been available? Because if you look at it objectively, World War II was

01:23:43.520 started in defence of Poland and Eastern Europe from being occupied by Hitler. All of that territory,

01:23:48.840 and way more, ends up falling to a dictator who's almost as bad.

01:23:53.300 That's right. Yeah, that is the ultimate sort of irony of World War II. There are others, you know,

01:24:01.880 he starts believing that the British Empire needs to be protected, and we wind up so poor and poverty

01:24:11.320 stricken and weak that the Empire has to be given away. He is an anti-socialist, and yet the whole of

01:24:20.440 Eastern Europe is dominated by communism. There are lots of ironies of the Second World War. But the

01:24:26.440 central one, which is that Adolf Hitler had to be stopped, Nazism had to be extirpated and destroyed,

01:24:34.280 that's the one that I think Britain and the Western powers have an untarnishable glory in being the

01:24:45.400 people who started from the first day of the war and went on to the last day of the war. And that's

01:24:51.160 something that Canadians and Australians, New Zealanders and so on, Indians, are able, I think,

01:24:57.160 to take great pride along with the British for.

01:25:00.120 Were there any other options at Yalta? Could they have done anything to save Western Europe?

01:25:03.720 Well, yeah, there was this thing called Operation Unthinkable. This wasn't at Yalta.

01:25:10.120 There was nothing you could do at Yalta because by that stage the Soviets had millions of boots on

01:25:14.840 the ground in Poland and Eastern Europe. But by the time of Potsdam, of course, the United States had

01:25:21.800 the nuclear bomb, but there was simply no way they could have threatened to use it against their Soviet 0.71

01:25:27.000 allies who had lost 27 million, a million human beings, and against the Germans.

01:25:39.320 Uncle Joe Stalin was very popular in the West, of course. There was simply no way that the nuclear

01:25:46.280 bomb could have been threatened against the Russians. And of course, you still had to win the war in the

01:25:54.280 East against Japan. And the Russians promised to go to war three months to the day after the end

01:26:01.960 of the war in Europe, and they carried out that promise. So, no, the opportunities were non-existent, frankly.

01:26:11.160 And moving over to the war in the East, some of the most brutal and horrific fighting was in

01:26:16.120 countries like Burma, where we suffered horrific losses. How much was Churchill involved in the

01:26:23.560 discussions about dropping the nuclear bombs on Japan?

01:26:26.440 Oh, very closely involved. It was an Anglo-American decision. Absolutely. He was as much in favor of it as

01:26:33.720 Truman. He had signed the original agreements with FDR about the joint decision making. A lot of British 0.98

01:26:45.000 scientists were, of course, involved in what was going on in New Mexico in creating the bomb. And it wasn't until

01:26:57.400 after the war, in the March of 1946, that the Americans moved to essentially make the nuclear bomb an

01:27:05.640 American thing and cut the British out of the decision making process. 0.96

01:27:09.400 So, he thought it was a necessary evil to bring Japan, essentially humiliate them and decimate them?

01:27:19.000 Well, to defeat them, essentially. He wasn't that worried about humiliation and decimation so much as

01:27:24.920 their surrender. And it did take place, of course, within days of the Nagasaki bomb being dropped.

01:27:31.480 And before we move on and we talk about other things, what was Churchill's impression of Hitler?

01:27:38.120 Was this someone that he actually, despite, obviously, the awful atrocities the man committed,

01:27:43.000 was this someone that he had a grudging amount of respect for?

01:27:46.120 No, no. He thought of Hitler as being completely useless as a strategist. He thought at the very 0.95

01:27:52.520 beginning of the war, when Hitler was doing extremely well, that maybe he did have a sixth sense. 0.82

01:27:59.080 He worried that he did. But it soon became very clear when he made mistake after mistake, especially

01:28:06.120 in North Africa, the timing of the invasion of Russia, and then one mistake after another in Russia, 0.91

01:28:14.360 that actually he was a pretty useless strategist. And he made lots of jokes about Corporal Schickel

01:28:20.200 Gruber and what a bad strategist he was. And in fact, when in July 19, the 20th of July 1944,

01:28:28.280 the Germans tried to kill Hitler and blow him up. And Churchill went on the radio and said,

01:28:35.080 well, we can be pleased that they failed because of all the strategic mistakes that Corporal Schickel

01:28:41.000 Gruber is making. So no, he didn't have a high respect for him. He thought of him as a common

01:28:47.320 gutter snipe. He called him at one point, caucus boss. He has some absolutely magnificent phraseology

01:28:54.840 for Hitler, which he unleashed. Even better phraseology for Mussolini, actually, as well. 0.97

01:29:01.080 And were his criticisms of Hitler accurate?

01:29:07.800 Yes. Overall, they certainly were. Because Hitler, as I mentioned, didn't listen to many of his top 0.91

01:29:16.440 generals. He had people like Gerd von Rundstedt and Erwin Rommel, Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian. These

01:29:26.360 generals who were far better strategists than he, people who had gone to staff college, who had been

01:29:33.960 officers in the Great War, and who were, you know, very significant and impressive commanders in the

01:29:41.640 field. And they would go and talk to Hitler. As I say, we have every word spoken in the Führer 0.86

01:29:47.800 conferences. And Hitler would just stick to his original ideas about what he wanted. He also 0.93

01:29:56.120 became a terrible micromanager, much, much worse than Churchill. Churchill came back as the war

01:30:01.880 progressed and was able to see things in the round. Whereas Hitler would concentrate on where individual 0.76

01:30:08.680 regiments were trying to capture individual villages deep in Russia, which was, of course, 0.63

01:30:14.680 a ridiculous way to fight a war. So when one looks at the different ways that the two men

01:30:23.880 dealt with decision-making, they're very, very different.

01:30:26.280 And do you think part of it as well, why Churchill was a far more competent leader,

01:30:31.000 is the fact that he was much more emotionally stable than Hitler?

01:30:34.200 No, it wasn't just that. And by the way, he was a very emotional man. He burst into tears some 50 times

01:30:40.200 during the Second World War. You would get very emotional. He wasn't, in that sense,

01:30:44.200 a stiff upper-lipped Victorian. He was a much more sort of Regency aristocratic figure who wore his

01:30:50.920 heart on his sleeve. No, what it was was that he was far more intelligent than Hitler. And he had spent 0.90

01:30:58.120 a lifetime thinking about grand strategy ever since he had been taught it when he was at Sandhurst. He had,

01:31:06.280 of course, in the First World War, been thinking about and been involved in grand strategy. Not always

01:31:11.240 successfully, as we discover from the Dardanelles. But nonetheless, he was also involved in very

01:31:17.240 successful parts of it. And he was a person who wrote a lot of history. One of the reasons I'm

01:31:24.200 proud to be an historian was that Winston Churchill was an historian. He was able to look at the problems

01:31:30.280 of the day through the lens of history. And he also was somebody who would listen to his strategists

01:31:39.000 and take their advice and not overrule them. So he had all of these enormous advantages that Hitler 0.95

01:31:46.360 chose to throw away. And what did he make of Stalin?

01:31:48.920 Well, interestingly, Stalin actually came round to the Western way of making war, the deliberative

01:31:56.920 way, the interactive way, rather than the way he started off. At the time of Operation Barbarossa,

01:32:05.400 he had something akin to a mental breakdown and went back to his dacha and couldn't be heard from at

01:32:11.560 all until the Politburo went to him.

01:32:13.800 And by the way, just to add something, when they arrived, he thought they were there to arrest him.

01:32:19.160 Yeah, absolutely. And to liquidate him. Exactly. And so he was surprised and very pleasantly surprised

01:32:27.240 when they turned to him and said, you know, you are our leader and you've got to save us.

01:32:33.080 And what he then did was to listen. I mean, he was a dictator, of course. But nonetheless,

01:32:38.520 he listened to men like Zhukov and Rokosovsky and Ivan Konev and the great Russian marshals.

01:32:46.360 And when the great battles that we mentioned earlier of Stalingrad and Moscow and Kursk and so on,

01:32:52.680 and the Battle of Berlin were fought, they were fought by the marshals interacting in a rational

01:33:04.120 and logical way with Stalin. And he didn't go down the Hitler route, which he perfectly easily could 0.86

01:33:09.960 have, of course, because he was a paranoid dictator. But just on the Stalin thing, Churchill and Stalin

01:33:17.560 met on several occasions at these conferences. Do we know what Churchill made of Stalin?

01:33:22.920 I'm afraid he liked him. As you can tell, I'm an admirer of Winston Churchill. And I'm sorry to say

01:33:33.480 that he got on very well with the most evil man apart from Hitler. He had a bit of a drinking 0.73

01:33:40.920 competition with him at the Kremlin, the first time they met in the August of 1942. Then he got on very

01:33:48.600 well with him again in the October of 1944. He visited Moscow both times, of course. They also

01:33:55.320 met at Tehran and Yalta and Potsdam. And there was one moment where Stalin said that he was going to

01:34:04.440 shoot 50,000 German officers out of hand as soon as they were captured. And Churchill got up from the

01:34:10.120 table and marched out and refused to interact. But other than that, I'm afraid they got on well. He

01:34:17.880 believed he could out drink Stalin in vodka. Very interesting. Well, Andrew, it's been such an

01:34:25.640 interesting discussion of the biography of Winston Churchill. And we wanted to bring it a little bit

01:34:30.280 into a conversation about his legacy and how people talk about him. Now, we've obviously seen an attempt

01:34:38.040 to change the narrative, let's put it like this, or to perhaps drag his legacy out of the historical

01:34:45.240 context in which it exists. And as you well know, his statue just down the road here in Parliament

01:34:50.360 Square was defaced with the words Churchill was a racist and all of this. And by the way, based on

01:34:55.720 what you were saying earlier, I think by the standards of the modern day, a kind of Victorian

01:35:03.080 racial superiority by our standards today would be absolutely considered that way. Absolutely. No, no,

01:35:09.000 in today's world, his views are obscene and absurd, of course, also. But what he didn't know was the

01:35:20.440 scientific underpinning that we have, whereby we know that racism, biological racism is obscene and

01:35:28.360 absurd. They believed in a Darwinian form of scientific racism, which is despicable to us today, of course.

01:35:38.120 But I think to blacken his memory because of something that was considered a scientific fact

01:35:46.840 at the time that he was living is pretty strange. It's a sort of unhistorical way, ahistorical way,

01:35:54.840 really, of approaching people in the past. Well, this is quite what I was going to ask you,

01:36:00.360 which is, I don't know what you make as a historian of the fact that people seem to have forgotten that

01:36:05.960 there was a different time in which values were different, scientific understanding.

01:36:11.080 You see, I wonder whether they do genuinely think that, or whether or not it's just a political

01:36:17.800 thing, where they impose ideological stances. And they know perfectly well that actually they

01:36:25.560 don't really make much sense logically. But they don't care because they want a grandstand, want to,

01:36:30.840 you know, use a spray can to make a political point, essentially. And they know that it is infuriating

01:36:42.520 and hurtful, really, to a generation of people, our grandparents and parents' generation, who remember

01:36:48.760 the Second World War. It's also, of course, very stupid in a way, because the people who had Hitler 0.99

01:36:58.120 won the war, had Churchill not been there to ensure that we fought on in 1940, had the Germans 0.99

01:37:05.960 successfully invaded, had they managed to establish the Third Reich in Britain and elsewhere, you know, 0.78

01:37:13.000 the people that would have come off worst were not the whites. And they ultimately would have had a 0.96

01:37:19.800 terrible, terrible time, of course, white British people. But compared to their ghastly time, what 1.00

01:37:29.560 would have happened to non-white people in a Nazi world would have been far worse. 0.74

01:37:35.000 And I think this is such an important point because people seem to miss this when they denigrate 0.82

01:37:41.000 Churchill and they say that he was this evil man. And you go, really? What was the alternative?

01:37:49.800 The alternative was truly horrific. When one thinks of the way that the Nazis treated every

01:37:57.480 non-Aryan people. And not just the Nazis, you know, the Japanese killed some 17% of the Filipinos,

01:38:09.880 for example. You know, if that had happened in India, with the 300 million people in India,

01:38:14.760 that would have led to the deaths of 50 million Indians. But fortunately, the British Empire and the 1.00

01:38:21.240 Indian forces of the British Empire held the Japanese back in North East India and they didn't manage to

01:38:29.640 get into India. You know, it would have been for all of the subject peoples, the native peoples,

01:38:37.640 you call them what you like, of the British Empire, much, much worse if Nazism had prevailed. And one of 0.90

01:38:45.080 the reasons it didn't prevail was Winston Churchill.

01:38:48.520 And what can we learn from this man, this incredible figure in history?

01:38:52.120 Oh, so much, so much. I mean, his wit, his charm, his intelligence, his quotations,

01:38:59.240 the things he said about the things that matter, about politics and about freedom and liberty in

01:39:06.680 the world. Those are the most important things. Then there's a lot of things about life, actually,

01:39:12.280 and about resilience and about resilience and the need for courage. He said of courage that it was

01:39:19.560 the most important of all the human values because it underpins all the rest. And you see him again and

01:39:26.600 again and again showing his moral courage as well as his physical courage. And he gives an example in his

01:39:37.320 own life. He is somebody who is willing to explain all the time what he's doing. He never hid his

01:39:49.320 light under a bushel. He wrote these 37 books, which are all of them still worth reading, all of them,

01:39:56.040 which is an incredible thing considering he started writing in the 19th century. And he was somebody who

01:40:03.960 had this extraordinary foresight. Not only was he able to tell before the First World War that the

01:40:09.400 Germans were going to cause a great threat to the balance of power in Europe, but before the Second 0.99

01:40:18.920 World War and after the Second World War, he warned against Nazism and Soviet communism, the sort of

01:40:25.400 two twin totalitarian threats of the 20th century. So there is so much still to learn from him. And the

01:40:32.120 good thing is that when you write about him in the book that I wrote about him, it's just such fun,

01:40:37.080 because every four or five pages or so, he comes up with a witticism or an aperçu or some kind of insight

01:40:44.280 that your jaw drops. And he was also very intelligent with the way that he dealt with

01:40:51.400 Germany post-war as well. They didn't make the same mistakes as they made in 1918.

01:40:57.080 Exactly. Well, they did split Germany, of course, which they hadn't done in 1918. They split Germany into two.

01:41:03.240 But they made sure that the western half of Germany was democratic. And when Stalin tried to

01:41:10.840 to suck Berlin into the Soviet more in 1948, the British and Americans stopped them from doing that.

01:41:23.320 And eventually, as a direct result of that, NATO was created in the April of 1949.

01:41:28.840 Andrew, I want to ask you a question that's less about Churchill and more about

01:41:34.200 what you see as a historian. Because as we've been talking, one of the things that struck me when we were

01:41:39.560 talking about a weakening empire, demoralisation, it sort of all sounds quite familiar to me as I

01:41:47.720 look around and I look at the western world today. Are there parallels to be drawn between the period

01:41:53.160 maybe before World War II and today's world? I think there are. Yes, absolutely. And we're speaking,

01:41:59.240 of course, today on the day that Alexei Navalny has essentially been murdered by a despot.

01:42:10.520 Adolf Hitler murdered a lot of people even before the Second World War broke out.

01:42:18.120 The way in which Ukraine has 1.00

01:42:24.520 fought back against Putin's Russia is an interesting example of how free people can fight back,

01:42:34.840 especially if they've got their help, of course, of the free world. And I do see overlaps between

01:42:43.400 Zelensky and Winston Churchill. He's been called Winston Churchill with an iPhone

01:42:48.280 because he does have this command of the language and this tremendous bravery. He, like Churchill refusing to

01:42:55.320 leave London in the Blitz, stayed in Kyiv in those key moments immediately after the Russian invasion. So,

01:43:03.960 yes, there are overlaps, but one doesn't want to ever really put too much emphasis of the 1930s on to

01:43:17.720 present day. I know that there are echoes and there are shadows, but it's by no means exact.

01:43:25.240 No, actually, I understand why you answered the question the way that you did, because a lot of

01:43:30.440 people have made the parallel. I wasn't suggesting that we are on the path to another world war,

01:43:36.840 actually. What I meant is more that there is a kind of, I don't remember the phrase that Churchill

01:43:43.720 used that you quoted earlier, but there's a kind of loss of self-confidence.

01:43:47.400 Drawing tides of drift and surrender. Quite. It sort of feels, and it comes back very much to the

01:43:53.800 cultural conversation we were having a few moments ago about the denigration of statues, the denigration

01:43:59.160 of history, the complete lack of teaching of history, and Orwell warned about this, that the way to

01:44:05.000 demoralize a people is to take away from them their history. Do you feel that, you know, there is a

01:44:11.800 kind of decay that's happening in the West? Oh, yes, I certainly do. I think the way in which

01:44:17.960 especially in the United States, the pulling down of statues, and even statues of people who are

01:44:26.600 obvious heroes, you know, people who fought against slavery in the 19th century, mid 19th century,

01:44:34.840 and even actually pulling down the statues of the founding fathers, moving Thomas Jefferson's

01:44:42.360 statue out of the New York chamber, for example, council chamber. I mean, this is an extraordinary

01:44:49.640 form of national suicide. It's moral suicide. I mean, these people, yes, of course, they're not

01:44:57.080 great with regard to slavery. But these people were in the latter part of the 18th century. You have to

01:45:06.600 see them in their own terms. And what they did was immensely brave in standing up against the British

01:45:11.960 Empire, which I've been speaking in favour of recently. But they stood against the British Empire,

01:45:16.760 and created a great nation based on a document of genius, which has lasted for a quarter of a

01:45:24.280 millennium. And the idea you pull down these people's statues, as I say, I think it's a form of national

01:45:29.160 suicide. And touching on the British Empire, how do you think we have this discussion,

01:45:36.520 and the way that we frame it and the way that we talk about it? Is it completely ahistorical?

01:45:41.320 No, not completely. It's taught a lot, obviously, in schools. I hope that people will read books like

01:45:49.640 Nigel Bigger's latest book on colonialism, A Moral Reckoning, where he tries to put it into its proper

01:45:59.080 historical context, and not just have a complete knee-jerk reaction built, essentially, on present

01:46:07.560 day identity politics. If we're much more sensible about it, and actually listen to the voices of the

01:46:15.480 past, and try and work out what Lord Curzon was trying to do when he went out to be vice-boy of India,

01:46:22.040 you know. The idea of treating these people as evil is a very short-sighted and ignorant, 0.99

01:46:35.160 I think, way of going about it. And I fully agree with you, because the reality is that no one can

01:46:41.080 withstand the scrutiny that these people are subjected to. Even Gandhi. People will say,

01:46:48.360 you know, he was a whole awful person because he did this and he did that. Like young children

01:46:52.920 in his bed, mate. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And he was a racist. And you go,

01:46:59.480 what about the things that he achieved? Well, precisely, precisely. You've got to see people.

01:47:05.880 I think, by the way, this is one of the reasons that Churchill's probably more popular in America

01:47:10.040 than he is here in England, because people in America are able to see the wood for the trees.

01:47:15.000 They're not obsessed about, I don't know, Tony Pandy and the striking miners of 1911.

01:47:22.600 They're much more interested in the big picture, in the person who helped create the grand strategy

01:47:30.120 that helped win at least the Western Allied grand strategy that helped win the Second World War.

01:47:36.840 And so you have an ability in America, really, to look at the most important aspects. But you're

01:47:42.280 right. Not only would nobody, but nobody, be able to be looked on as a hero if you constantly look

01:47:50.840 solely at their feet of clay. But also, in our own time, our great-grandchildren are going to pull

01:47:58.760 down our statues for reasons that we have not the first clue about, things that we think are

01:48:04.280 scientifically proven facts. We're going to have our statues pulled down because, I don't know,

01:48:10.920 we allow our children to use mobile phones. And at the moment, that sounds weird. But in 100 years'

01:48:17.640 time, that's what will happen. But unless we learn the lesson, which is, of course,

01:48:22.360 that you have to see people in their own time.

01:48:25.720 Andrew, what haven't we asked you about Churchill that we should have done?

01:48:30.840 I think you haven't asked me one question, which I am very interested in, and which I'd like to

01:48:37.240 answer, which is, how was it that he was the person who was able to spot Adolf Hitler and the Nazis?

01:48:45.880 Yes. That's a great question. Thank you. That's kind of you. Thank you. What was it about him? What

01:48:53.240 was the sort of alchemy, the special alchemy about him that allowed him to be not only the first person,

01:48:59.960 but for many years in the 1930s, the only person who could see what Hitler and the Nazis were all about,

01:49:06.760 and therefore all against them? And the answer is, I think, threefold. The first was that he was a

01:49:12.360 Philo-Semite. He liked Jews. He'd grown up with Jews. His father had liked Jews. He'd been on holiday 0.90

01:49:18.440 with Jews. He recognised the contribution that Jews had made to Judeo-Christian civilisation. He was a

01:49:27.480 supporter of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. He was somebody who therefore had an early warning system

01:49:35.480 about Hitler and the Nazis that was not vouchsafed to many of the other upper-class English

01:49:42.200 people of his age and class and generation, many of whom were anti-Semitic. That's the first thing.

01:49:48.680 The second thing, and of course that's something that we should think about now more than any time

01:49:53.880 before in our lifetimes, because anti-Semitism is now on the rise in a way that it hasn't been at

01:49:58.840 any other stage in our lives. So standing by Jews as the forefront of civilisation, essentially,

01:50:06.120 that is one thing about Winston Churchill. The next thing is that he was an historian,

01:50:13.400 and he was able to place the threat, the hegemonic threat that Nazi Germany posed in the context of the

01:50:24.840 long continuum of British history. The threat of the Spanish Armada of 1588, of Louis XIV at the time of the

01:50:35.640 wars of Spanish succession, which of course his own great ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough,

01:50:40.920 was instrumental in defeating. And then the threat of Napoleon, of the First World War that he fought

01:50:49.240 in the trenches. And so he was able to see these four great threats before in history and slip Hitler 0.92

01:50:57.560 into the position of the fifth great threat, which of course he was. Indeed, he was a greater threat than

01:51:02.600 any of those ones before, because of the bomber. And the last thing was that he had seen true

01:51:13.240 fundamentalism, fanaticism in his life. He had fought on the northwest frontier, he fought in Sudan,

01:51:21.080 he had seen in this case Islamic fundamentalism, and he saw the same tropes in the Nazis that he had seen

01:51:30.040 before, this hatred of democracy, this complete ability to turn reality on its head.

01:51:37.240 And because he was able to do that in a way that the other prime ministers of the 1930s,

01:51:42.920 men like Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, who'd never seen fanatics before

01:51:47.720 in their lives at all, none of them. He was able to spot this special thing about Hitler and the Nazis, 0.82

01:51:55.640 and to warn and warn and warn. Just because people didn't listen to him, he didn't change his message.

01:52:03.160 Most politicians, especially today, would change their message because of what the opinion polls

01:52:07.720 were saying. He took no notice of opinion polls. He didn't listen to what the editorials were saying

01:52:13.080 in the newspapers. He said what he believed, and he carried on saying it until he was proved right.

01:52:18.120 You've made a really profound point there, when you compare it to the present day politicians,

01:52:22.920 who all they do is go from school to university, to then doing an internship, to then working in

01:52:29.240 politics. And the reality is these people, both Labour and Conservative and Liberal Democrat,

01:52:34.440 have no experience of the real world. But when you compare that with Winston Churchill,

01:52:39.000 who experienced everything the world had to offer, and as a result of that, was a magnificent leader.

01:52:44.680 I completely agree with every word here. Andrew, fantastic. We're going to ask you some

01:52:50.200 questions from our supporters in a second, so follow us over to Locals where we'll do that.

01:52:56.520 I seem to remember him saying the words to the effect of, we are with Europe, but not of Europe.

01:53:00.920 Churchill was more international rather than regional and imperialist.

01:53:04.360 So what would he make today of our politics with the European Union?

01:53:14.680 nie

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TRIGGERnometry - March 31, 2024

The Truth About Winston Churchill - Andrew Roberts

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