Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was a strange one.
A political opportunist of the first order, possessed of an immense vision along with a genius for disaster – breaking a legal contract with Turkey and keeping what became the H.M.S. Agincourt from the Turks – a "white elephant" of a dreadnought which fired exactly ONE salvo at Jutland – but his seizure of it helped push Turkey in on the German side in WWI. Then he birthed the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to undo his mistake.
After that, a lonely Demosthenes warning of Hitler and the Nazis, turned to in desperation in May, 1940, and made P.M., wherein he earned undying fame for his oratory about "fighting on the beaches...we will never surrender" but otherwise leaving a very torturous record in WWII.
Amongst other follies were the terror bombing of German cities, the Singapore fiasco: losing 100s of thousands of men over an empty naval base – and really, ringing the death knell of the British Empire – not to mention redrawing Poland's borders to please Stalin; but worst of all, he fought like a devil to keep the U.S. from invading France in 1943, which would have ended the war a year earlier. See: 1943, The Victory That Never Was by John Grigg, 1980, for an excellent, in-depth discussion about this fascinating, but utterly depressing, scenario.
Yet the man had courage, a genius-level IQ, and an astounding memory, honestly. Just one of history's strangest almost – though never quite – Great Ones; and on top of the rest of it, a miserable father to his son, Randolph – though to be fair, his own father was a pitiful man, and his mother, the American heiress whose reputation suffered (shall we say politely?) of whom Churchill wrote, "I loved her dearly – but at a distance".
An Préachán
A political opportunist of the first order, possessed of an immense vision along with a genius for disaster – breaking a legal contract with Turkey and keeping what became the H.M.S. Agincourt from the Turks – a "white elephant" of a dreadnought which fired exactly ONE salvo at Jutland – but his seizure of it helped push Turkey in on the German side in WWI. Then he birthed the disastrous Gallipoli campaign to undo his mistake.
After that, a lonely Demosthenes warning of Hitler and the Nazis, turned to in desperation in May, 1940, and made P.M., wherein he earned undying fame for his oratory about "fighting on the beaches...we will never surrender" but otherwise leaving a very torturous record in WWII.
Amongst other follies were the terror bombing of German cities, the Singapore fiasco: losing 100s of thousands of men over an empty naval base – and really, ringing the death knell of the British Empire – not to mention redrawing Poland's borders to please Stalin; but worst of all, he fought like a devil to keep the U.S. from invading France in 1943, which would have ended the war a year earlier. See: 1943, The Victory That Never Was by John Grigg, 1980, for an excellent, in-depth discussion about this fascinating, but utterly depressing, scenario.
Yet the man had courage, a genius-level IQ, and an astounding memory, honestly. Just one of history's strangest almost – though never quite – Great Ones; and on top of the rest of it, a miserable father to his son, Randolph – though to be fair, his own father was a pitiful man, and his mother, the American heiress whose reputation suffered (shall we say politely?) of whom Churchill wrote, "I loved her dearly – but at a distance".
An Préachán
