Churchill's Walk With Destiny

In 1890, when Winston Churchill was 16-years-old, he told a schoolmate that someday it would fall to him to defend England against invasion and “save the empire.” In 1932, in the midst of Churchill’s “wilderness years,” Lady Astor told Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that Churchill’s political career was finished. Eight years later, Churchill was summoned by the King to form a War Cabinet to lead the nation at the time of its greatest peril.

When Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, the odds against him succeeding in saving Britain were enormous. For most of the previous eight years, the world’s democracies — with fresh memories of the slaughter on the Western Front in the First World War, and saddled with economic problems in the aftermath of the Great Depression — repeatedly appeased Hitler’s Germany as it violated the terms of the Versailles Treaty, bullied its neighbors, acquired new territory by force and intimidation, and engaged in a massive arms build-up. 

Throughout much of the appeasement period, Churchill spoke often in the House of Commons, repeatedly warning of the gathering storm. Armed with information provided by allies within the government’s bureaucracy, Churchill provided facts, figures, and trends that indicated a growing German military threat and exposed Britain’s defense deficiencies. And in those speeches, he ridiculed the sanguine voices of appeasement and urged Britain’s leaders to provide the military and moral rearmament necessary to meet Hitler’s challenge. But none of the British leaders — and none of the leaders of the world’s other democracies — listened. 

Churchill: Europe has only one choice

Hitler annexed Austria (the Anschluss) in March 1938. In the House of Commons, Churchill said: “Europe is confronted with a program of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage, and there is only one choice open . . . –either to submit, like Austria, or else to take effective measures while time remains to ward off the danger.” In September of that same year, Hitler was ceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement, which Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hailed as “peace for our time.” In the House of Commons, Churchill said: “[W]e have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat. . . . a disaster of the first magnitude.” What Churchill feared most, he said, “is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure.” 

After Hitler grabbed all of Czechoslovakia, Churchill knew that Poland was next on Hitler’s menu. In late March 1939, Britain and France pledged to fight if Germany attacked Poland. Churchill knew that this “Polish Guarantee” would not deter Hitler after the “catalogue of surrenders” that preceded it. Nevertheless, in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of the Second World War, Churchill wrote that it was the right decision:

Britain, France declare war on Germany

When Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, after secretly agreeing with the Soviet Union to partition the country, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Churchill was summoned by the Prime Minister to be first Lord of the Admiralty — the same office he held at the beginning of the First World War. 

Eight months later, after the disastrous Norway campaign, Chamberlain lost the confidence of Parliament. With much uncertainty and trepidation, King George VI summoned Churchill to take the reigns of government on May 10, 1940. That same day, Hitler launched his invasion of the Low Countries and France. The Battle of France was over in a little more than a month. Britain was now alone.

When he assumed office as Prime Minister, Churchill offered his countrymen “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” But when France fell and the British army had to evacuate the continent from Dunkirk, many in the government, including Foreign Secretary Halifax, urged Churchill to make a deal with Hitler. Instead, Churchill pledged:

[W]e shall not flag or fail . . . We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender.

At one point during the debate over whether to make a deal with Hitler, Churchill summoned the War Cabinet and other members of the House of Commons. He told them:

I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with that man

[Hitler]. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went

on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that  would be called “disarmament”—our naval bases and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up—under Mosley— or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side, we had immense reserves and advantages. And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. We shall go on and fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.  

Churchill’s prediction that he would be called upon to save England — made when he was just 16 — came true. At the end of The Gathering Storm, Churchill reflected on why he was so confident and slept so soundly on the evening of May 10, 1940. “At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene,” he wrote. “I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. . . . I was sure I should not fail.”