Spot on.
BBC. Lead story. Timing and placement seem awfully convenient timing.
Churchill was not a successful leader either. I am copying from a Quora article.
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Churchill’s big claim to fame is being at the right place at the right time (London, May 1940) and not completely screwing it up. It’s not a high bar to clear, but was apparently still too high for his contemporaries to clear.
The first thing you need to know is that in May 1940, Churchill was among the least respected men in Parliament. Despite being born in a literal palace (Blenheim Palace), he torpedoed his political career in WWI when he fronted the Gallipoli Campaign, widely considered the worst expedition of the war by any nation. Given all the other asinine ventures of WWI, that’s saying something.
Despite Churchill’s image as a hero of the everyman, he was actually born in Blenheim Palace, descending from John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough.
The Gallipoli Campaign was the brainchild of a younger Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. It became the only notable Ottoman victory of the war. The ANZACs were stuck at the bottom of a cliff for eight months. This proved such a traumatic episode that it may have led to the birth of Australian and New Zealand nationalism.
But in May 1940, literally no one wanted to be Prime Minister. It was assumed that the poor bastard who got the job would be forced to either sign a humiliating peace with Nazi Germany or oversee a brutal land war in Europe that wasn’t going well.
Into that gap, stepped Churchill. The man who seemed to always believe the year is 1850 and the British Empire was still at its zenith.
Less than a month into his tenure, the entire British Expeditionary Force in France was stuck on a beach in Dunkirk. Historians seem to give him a free pass on losing France, but give him credit for successfully evacuating the BEF and some 90,000 French soldiers (nearly all the French eventually returned to France to surrender).
If you watched the movie Dunkirk, you’d think this was some colossal feat of bravery on the part of civilians in little yachts. The reality is that the vast majority of the force was evacuated by a few Royal Navy destroyers and a tiny fraction by civilian yachts. Honestly, it’s not that hard to evacuate men from a beach when you have the largest navy in Europe, and are allied to the nation with the second largest (France).
The evacuation from Dunkirk was far less dramatic than the popular narrative makes it out to be. The reality was that you had over 300,000 armed men defending a tiny perimeter, precisely the kind of hard nut that the thin-skinned German panzers were not designed to crack. The Royal Navy also enjoyed total supremacy, and thus quickly evacuated the men with a few destroyers. Interference from the Luftwaffe was minimal.
What I’m trying to get across is that historians have been rather kind to Churchill on account of it painting a more romanticized version of the war years.
Then there’s the big narrative about Churchill being the lone man in Parliament with the balls to defy Hitler and refuse to enter into peace talks. This is all factually true. But it was more down to the utter cowardice of Parliament than to Churchill having a 10-inch penis that pees gin or whatever.
The low-grade, History Channel-tier narrative is that Churchill was the anti-Hitler, the underdog who stood defiant in the face of the Nazi colossus. The reality was that the Anglo-French had the two largest navies in Europe and the Germans had neither the ships nor planes to even attempt a crossing. Britain was also never at risk of being starved out. The country became food self-sufficient by 1941, and the German U-boats never managed to sink more than 3% of British Atlantic shipping.
The reality was that the Germans had absolutely no way to invade the UK, none whatsoever. The German air force didn’t have a single true torpedo bomber in operation, the Stuka pilots weren’t trained for maritime operations, and the Luftwaffe wasn’t capable of maintaining air superiority over the English Channel to begin with. Hitler’s big plan was to bluff the English into capitulation through an aerial bombing campaign. Preparations for Operational Sealion (the German invasion of England) never made it off the bar napkin stage.
The reason why the Germans never seriously contemplated an amphibious invasion was that they knew that even if the RAF and Royal Navy didn’t exist, they still lacked the maritime shipping capacity to sustain an invasion of that size. It simply could not be done. Their big idea was to use hundreds of Rhine river barges to sustain the operation, an utter fantasy.
And even if no British soldier made it off the beach at Dunkirk, the British Isles were far from undefended. The British Army still had reserves, and there were millions of WWI veterans who could be called up in a hurry (these men would have been in their 40s, entirely fit for service).
It’s not certain if Churchill had all these realities in mind when he told Hitler to eat an entire bag of dicks, or if it was more of his uninformed bravado. I suspect it was mostly the latter.
And that’s really it. That’s the one big thing that Churchill got right, not surrendering to Nazi Germany in 1940. Everything that came after, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic were all the work of the Royal Air Force and Navy. The few times when Churchill directly intervened resulted in disaster, like the sinking of the battleships HMS Prince of Wales and Repulse.
His insistence on a dogged defense in Malaya and Burma resulted in the greatest Japanese victories of the war.
Churchill also oversaw the disastrous defense strategy that led to the capitulation of Singapore in 1942. Some 90,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers surrendered to a Japanese force 1/3 their number. It was the largest surrender of British forces in history, and by far the greatest Japanese victory of the war.
Then there’s the Dieppe Raid, another amateurish failure that rarely gets attributed to Churchill. Historians love to claim that the failed raid was a “good lesson for D-Day”, and completely forget that the raid was what led to the construction of the Atlantic Wall and the establishment of a vast defense network in northern France.
Finally, there’s the entire Italian campaign, by far the worst bad call from Churchill. It’s also the only one that historians won’t give him a free pass on. Any teenager with a world map could tell you that invading Germany through Italy was a bad idea. Italy itself is one long chain of mountains, perfect for defense. And then there’s the freaking Alps, the tallest mountains in Europe. You could not think of a worse way to invade Germany if you tried.
This is the abbey of Monte Cassino after it was rebuilt. The original 1000 year old complex was completely destroyed during the Italian campaign, another one of Churchill’s bright ideas. The Battle of Monte Cassino is the perfect encapsulation of the whole campaign: a few Germans tying down vast numbers of Allied forces by using the natural terrain of Italy.
The Italian campaign did two things:
- It delayed the invasion of France by a year (the invasion that would have actually ended the war earlier, and saved Central Europe from Soviet occupation).
- It tied up vast resources against a much smaller commitment from the Germans. The Germans got the better deal by far.
Even when Hitler was putting a gun in his mouth after shooting his wife, Eva, the Allied forces in Italy hadn’t made it to the Alps. In other words, the campaign completely failed to achieve its main objective.
Ironically, Churchill would lose his Prime Minister seat even before the war ended. To most people this seems unthinkable. How could Britain treat its biggest war hero like that! Well… perhaps if they actually knew what Churchill did in detail, they’d find his ousting rather predictable.
Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, went on to become of the most successful Prime Ministers in British history. He created the modern British welfare state, the model by which all Western European countries molded themselves following the war.
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Churchill’s legacy in popular media is one of the best examples of bad history. It turns a mediocre leader with consistently awful judgement into some kind of champion of democracy and bulwark against evil. In terms of overrated Western leaders, he’s up there with JKF and Charles de Gaulle.
What’s worse is that in recent years there has been a debasement of the Churchill’s legacy, but for all the wrong reasons. They woke mob attacks him for his racist views and starving millions to death in Bengal. These criticisms completely ignore the fact that he was an Englishman born in 1874. His racism and utter disregard for the lives of Indians is to be expected, par for the course. His bad judgement, though, is timeless.
