The Last Lion Remembered
By Victor Davis Hanson
NationalReview.com
Winston Churchill never once flinched in the face of
the Third Reich.
Fifty years ago this Saturday, former British prime
minister Winston Churchill died at age 90.
Churchill is remembered for his multiple nonstop
careers as a statesman, cabinet minister,
politician, journalist, Nobel laureate historian,
and combat veteran. He began his career serving the
British military as a Victorian-era mounted lancer
and ended it as custodian of Britain’s nuclear
deterrent.
But he is most renowned for an astounding
five-year-tenure as Britain’s wartime prime minister
from May 10, 1940, to June 26, 1945, when he was
voted out of office not long after the surrender of
Nazi Germany.
Churchill took over the day Hitler invaded Western
Europe. Within six weeks, an isolated Great Britain
was left alone facing the Third Reich. What is now
the European Union was then either under Nazi
occupation, allied with Germany, or ostensibly
neutral while favoring Hitler.
The United States was not just neutral. It had no
intention of entering another European war — at
least not until after the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor a year and half later.
From August 1939 to June 1941, the Soviet Union was
an accomplice of the Third Reich. Russian leader
Joseph Stalin was supplying Hitler with critical
resources to help finish off Great Britain, the last
obstacle in Germany’s path of European domination.
Some of the British elite wished to cut a peace deal
with Hitler to save their empire and keep Britain
from being bombed or invaded. They understandably
argued that Britain could hardly hold out when
Poland, Denmark, Norway the Netherlands, Belgium,
and France all had not. Yet Churchill voiced
defiance and vowed to keep on fighting.
After the fall of France, Churchill readied
Britain’s defenses against a Nazi bombing blitz, and
then went on the offensive against Italy in the
Mediterranean.
As much of London went up in flames, Churchill never
flinched, despite the deaths of more than 40,000
British civilians.
By some estimates, the Soviet Red Army eventually
killed three out of four German soldiers who died in
World War II. The American economic colossus built
more military ships, aircraft, vehicles, and tanks
than did any other country during World War II.
In comparison with such later huge human and
material sacrifices, the original, critical British
role in winning World War II is often forgotten. But
Britain was the only major power on either side of
the war to fight continuously the entire six years,
from September 3, 1939, to September 2, 1945.
Britain was the only nation of the alliance to have
fought Nazi Germany alone without allies.
Churchill’s defiant wartime rhetoric anchored the
entire moral case against the Third Reich.
Unlike the Soviet Union or the United States,
Britain entered the war without being attacked, on
the principle of protecting independent Poland from
Hitler. Unlike America, Britain fought Germany from
the first day of the war to its surrender. Unlike
Russia, it fought the Japanese from the moment Japan
started the Pacific War to the Japanese general
surrender.
Churchill’s Britain had a far smaller population and
economy than either the Soviet Union or the United
States. Its industry and army were smaller than
Germany’s.
Defeat would have meant the end of British
civilization. But victory would ensure the end of
the British Empire and a future world dominated by
the victorious and all-powerful United States and
Soviet Union.
It was Churchill’s decision that Britain would fight
on all fronts of both the European and Pacific
theaters. He ordered strategic bombing over occupied
Europe, a naval war against the German submarine and
surface fleets, and a full-blown land campaign in
Burma.
He ensured that the Mediterranean stayed open from
Gibraltar to Suez. Churchill partnered with America
from North Africa to Normandy, and he helped to
supply Russia — even as Britain was broke and its
manpower exhausted.
In the mid-1930s, Churchill first — and loudest —
had damned appeasement and warned Europe and the
United States about the dangers of an aggressive
Nazi Germany. For that prescience, he was labeled a
warmonger who wished to revisit the horrors of World
War I.
After the end of World War II, the lone voice of
Churchill cautioned the West that its former wartime
ally, the Soviet Union, was creating an “Iron
Curtain” and was as ruthless as Hitler’s Germany had
been. Again, he was branded a paranoid who unfairly
demonized Communists.
The wisdom and spirit of Winston Churchill not only
saved Britain from the Third Reich, but Western
civilization from a Nazi dark age, when there was no
other nation willing to take up that defense.
Churchill was the greatest military, political, and
spiritual leader of the 20th century. The United
States has never owed more to a foreign citizen than
to Winston Churchill, a monumental presence 50 years
after his death.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian
at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and
the author, most recently, of The
Savior Generals. You can reach him by
e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
© 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.