Winston Churchill

November 30, 1874 – January 24, 1965

British Prime Minister who led the United Kingdom through World War II.

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Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, into an aristocratic family. A restless and mediocre student, he found his footing in the army, serving as a cavalry officer and war correspondent in India, Sudan, and South Africa. During the Boer War he was captured and made a daring escape from a prison camp in 1899, an adventure that made him famous and helped launch his political career. He was first elected to Parliament in 1900 and would sit in the House of Commons, on and off, for more than sixty years. Churchill rose quickly and held a string of high offices. As First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the First World War, he championed the 1915 Gallipoli campaign against the Ottoman Empire; when it failed with heavy losses, he was forced from office, a humiliation that shadowed him for years. He returned to government in various roles through the 1920s, but by the early 1930s he was out of power and widely written off as a politician whose best days were behind him. Those so-called wilderness years became his moment of vindication. While many British leaders hoped to avoid another war through appeasement, Churchill warned again and again about the growing menace of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, and called for Britain to rearm. He condemned the 1938 Munich Agreement as a disaster. When his warnings came true and Germany plunged Europe into war, the nation turned to him. On May 10, 1940, the very day Germany invaded France and the Low Countries, Churchill became Prime Minister. With France falling and Britain standing nearly alone, he refused to negotiate with Hitler. His speeches gave the country its voice: he offered nothing but 'blood, toil, tears and sweat,' vowed that Britons would 'fight on the beaches' and 'never surrender,' and told them that if the Empire endured a thousand years, this would be 'their finest hour.' Through the Battle of Britain and the bombing of the Blitz, his defiance helped hold the country together. Churchill understood that Britain could not defeat Nazi Germany alone. He built the Grand Alliance, forging a close partnership with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and, after Hitler invaded Russia, with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Meeting as the 'Big Three' at Tehran and Yalta, the Allies planned the strategy that led to the D-Day landings in 1944 and the final defeat of Germany. Explore that fight in the World War II journey. Victory did not save him at the ballot box. In July 1945, even before the war with Japan ended, British voters turned to the Labour Party and its promise of social reform, and Churchill lost the general election in a landslide. Out of office, he continued to shape the age. In a 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, he declared that 'an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,' giving the emerging Cold War its most famous image and warning of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Churchill returned as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955 and, in 1953, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his mastery of historical writing and his oratory. He remains one of the most celebrated leaders of the twentieth century, though historians also weigh his record honestly: a lifelong defender of the British Empire, he held views on race and colonial rule, and bears debated responsibility in the 1943 Bengal famine, that later generations have sharply criticized. He died on January 24, 1965, and was honored with a state funeral, remembered above all as the man who would not give in when the world's fate hung in the balance.

Winston Churchill

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