Winston Churchill Churchill came from a military family and entered the army as a cavalry officer. Between 1895 and 1898 he

Winston Churchill
    Churchill came of a military dynasty and was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for Marlborough. As a young man of undistinguished academic accomplishment—he was admitted to Sandhurst after two failed attempts—he entered the army as a cavalry officer. Between 1895 and 1898 he managed to see three campaigns:Spain’s struggle in Cuba in 1895, the North-West Frontier campaign in India 1897 and the Sudan campaign of 1898, where he took part in what is often described as the British Army’s last cavalry charge, at Omdurman. In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent, and in India and the Sudan he was present both as a war correspondent and as a serving officer. Thus he revealed two other aspects of his characters literary bent and an interest in public affairs.
    He was to write all his life. His life of Marlborough is one of the great English biographies, and The History of the Second World War helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature. Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. Politics consumed him. Churchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. In 1904 he left the Conservative Party to join the Liberals, in part out of calculation:the Liberals were the coming party, and in its ranks he soon achieved high office. He became Home Secretary in 1910 and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Thus it was as political head of the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 that he stepped onto the world stage.
    A passionate believer in the navy’s historic strategic role, he immediately committed the Royal Naval Division to an intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. Frustrated by the stalemate in Belgium and France that followed, he initiated the Allies’ only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to the Mediterranean. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to the Black Sea. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill’s resignation and led to his political eclipse.
    It was effectively to last nearly 25 years, despite his readmission to office in 1917 and his rejoining the Conservatives later. He failed to re-establish the reputation as a future national statesman he had won before the war. He resigned office in 1931 and entered what appeared to be a terminal political decline.
    By espousing anti-Nazi policies in his wilderness years between 1933 and 1939, he ensured that when the moment of final confrontation between Britain and Hitler came in 1940, he stood out as the one man in whom the nation could place its trust. He had decried the prewar appeasement policies of the Conservative leaders Baldwin and Chamberlain. When Chamberlain lost the confidence of Parliament, Churchill was installed in the premiership. His was a bleak inheritance. Following the total defeat of France, Britain truly, in his words, "stood alone". It had no substantial allies and, for much of 1940, lay under threat of German invasion and under constant German air attack. He nevertheless refused Hitler’s offers of peace, organized a successful air defense that led to the victory of the Battle of Britain and meanwhile sent most of what remained of the British army, after its escape from the humiliation of Dunkirk, to the Middle East to oppose Hitler’s Italian ally, Mussolini.
    This was one of the boldest strategic decisions in history. Convinced that Hitler could not invade Britain while the Royal Navy and its protecting Royal Air Force remained intact, he dispatched the army to a remote theater of war to open a second front against the Nazi alliance. Its victories against Mussolini during 1940-1941 both humiliated and infuriated Hitler, while its intervention in Greece, to oppose Hitler’s invasion of the Balkans, disrupted the Nazi dictator’s plans to conclude German conquests in Europe by defeating Russia.
    From the outset of his premiership, Churchill, half American by birth, had rested his hope of ultimate victory in U.S. intervention. He had established a personal relationship with President Roosevelt that he hoped would flower into a war-winning alliance. Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit the U.S. beyond an association "short of war" did not dent his optimism. He always hoped events would work his way. The decision by Japan, Hitler’s ally, to attack the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, justified his hopes. That evening he confided to himself, "So we had won after all."
    America’s entry into the Second World War marked the high point of Churchill’s statesmanship. During 1942, the prestige Britain had won as Hitler’s only enemy allowed Churchill to sustain parity of leadership in the anti-Nazi alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin.
    Churchill understandably exulted in the success of the D-day invasion when it came in 1944. By then it was the Russo-American rather than the Anglo-American nexus, however, that dominated the alliance, as he ruefully recognized at the lastBig Three conference in February 1945. Shortly afterward he suffered the domestic humiliation of losing the general election and with it the premiership. He was to return to power in 1951 and remain until April 1955, when ill health and visibly failing powers caused him to resign. It would have been kinder to his reputation had he not returned, because he belonged to war, not peace time.
    His name had been made, and he stood unchallengeable, as the greatest of all Britain’s war leaders. It was not only his own country, though, that owed him a debt. So too did the world of free men and women to whom he had made a constant and inclusive appeal in his magnificent speeches from embattled Britain in 1940 and 1941.