Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?

In the run-up to the BBC poll, politician Mo Mowlam – Churchill’s advocate – insisted that “he was the greatest Briton because he showed the determination and courage to protect Britain from invasion, and without his inspiring leadership the outcome of World War II may have been very different”.

Let’s unpack that claim a bit. Did Churchill really make such a difference in 1940 – and, if so, how? The answer to the first part is surely: yes – most of all through his energy and drive.

Although the tempo in Whitehall would have intensified anyway with the end of the ‘Phoney War’ and the German invasion of France, Churchill’s appointment as prime minister had a galvanising effect, dramatically symbolised by his famous red labels stuck on urgent documents: ACTION THIS DAY.

Churchill showed the determination and courage to protect Britain from invasion, and without his inspiring leadership the outcome of World War II may have been very different

Equally important, Churchill took a firm grip on military strategy. Mindful of the confusion and infighting of 1914–18, he appointed himself minister of defence. There was no ministry – that did not come until the 1960s. Churchill simply wanted the authority to deal with the chiefs of staff directly rather than via their politician ministers.

He yearned to be a war leader, unlike Neville Chamberlain – his predecessor as PM – or Lord Halifax, the alternative when Chamberlain lost the support of the Commons. Neither of them had any appetite for such a role, whereas Churchill – a soldier by training – had dreamed of it since childhood.

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Churchill was also an accomplished communicator. Often he’s remembered for his soundbites – ‘fight them on the beaches’, ‘finest hour’, ‘special relationship’ – but these were only the icing on the cake. Churchill regarded his speeches as tools of public education, helping the British population understand what became known as ‘the people’s war’.

When Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Churchill gave a radio address on the BBC about what he called “the Fourth Climacteric”, connecting it to three earlier turning points in the war. He spent hours preparing his speeches in a way that may seem inconceivable now in the days of tweets and social media.

There isn’t space here to do full justice to Churchill’s impact, but one other point should be mentioned. Most British premiers had received a classical education, informed by Latin, Greek and philosophy; few had any grasp of science and technology.

By contrast, Churchill loathed the classics but was fascinated by gadgets and science fiction – by the world of HG Wells. That’s why he quickly grasped the value of Ultra – the operation to intercept enemy signals intelligence – and ensured that the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were provided with an abundance of money and gifted personnel.

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The people’s war

Yet there’s another side to the story of 1940 that was not voiced by Mo Mowlam.

More important than Churchill’s “courage and determination” in protecting Britain from invasion after France fell were decisions during the 1930s by governments of which he was not a part. Key among these was the development of a new generation of fast monoplane fighters – Hurricanes and Spitfires – linked to the Chain Home system of radar stations giving crucial early warning of when and where enemy bombers were crossing the Channel.

Churchill was aware of these developments, and contributed to some of the discussions, but these were his ‘Wilderness Years’ when he was out of office. The decisions were made while the ‘appeasers’ were in power – and they were vital in winning the Battle of Britain.

That highlights a deeper point. Technological innovations such as radar and Ultra could have been developed only by an advanced industrial state – by what historian David Edgerton has called the ‘warfare state’ – often neglected in accounts of modern Britain because of a preoccupation with the welfare state.

The war that Churchill waged was possible only because of a long series of decisions and developments going back to the industrial revolution. This provides a salutary reminder that an intense focus on individual leaders can blind us to structural factors that also shape historical change.

Victory or bust

Surviving 1940 was one thing; winning the war was very different. Three days into his premiership, Churchill told the Commons that his goal was “victory at all costs”. Yet after the French signed an armistice with Germany on 22 June, that sounded like fantasy. France had been Britain’s principal ally throughout the First World War, its army anchoring the western front.

Britain was now alone – and there was no western front on the continent of Europe. Britain and its empire – from Canada to India, from the Caribbean to Australasia – made a major contribution to the war, but eventual victory over Hitler and the Axis depended substantially on the Soviet Union and the US. Put simply, the Soviets provided the manpower, the Americans the firepower.

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Between June 1941 and June 1944 – from the opening of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union until D-Day – more than 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army.

The US was the ‘arsenal of democracy’, producing an abundance of munitions and supplies, much of which was shared with its allies through Lend-Lease aid. And the arrival of the US and Soviet armies in Germany in 1945 was a prelude to the Cold War division of Europe between these two superpowers.

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Of course, Churchill was no mere spectator in all of this. The stereotype of the ‘bulldog’ can easily blind us to his remarkable skills as improviser. Even before the fall of France, he was assiduously courting president Franklin D Roosevelt with messages, later followed by personal visits to the US. He did the same with Joseph Stalin from 1942, becoming the essential intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin.

During a photo shoot at the Tehran conference in November 1943, when someone remarked that the ‘Big Three’ looked like the Holy Trinity, Stalin responded: “If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.”

The PM’s improvisations in shuttle diplomacy helped keep Britain in the diplomatic game – but by 1945, nothing could obscure the fact that the Big Three was more like the Big 2½.

Strategy for greatness

All that being so, the reason why he looms so large in accounts of the war, almost obscuring anyone and anything else, is because of Churchill the historian. We remember him in part because he was utterly determined not to be forgotten.

That had been true all his life. Right from the start, he had a clear strategy for greatness: hit the headlines as a soldier or a politician, then be sure to write your own account. Deeds and words: both were essential to ensure that his story became history. That’s what he did in the Second World War – a hefty six-pack of volumes published between 1948 and 1954, less than a decade after victory was won.

The PM’s improvisations in shuttle diplomacy helped keep Britain in the diplomatic game – but by 1945, nothing could obscure the fact that the Big Three was more like the Big 2½

No other war leader was a serious competitor. Roosevelt died before the war ended; Stalin published no autobiography; and the trilogy of war memoirs by Charles de Gaulle did not appear until 1954–59. So Churchill got into print quickly and in formidable detail, determined to shape the public narrative before others could do so.

He was careful to say that his work was not history but “a contribution to history which will be of service to the future”, told mainly from the vantage point of Number 10. But the heavy ballast of quotation from his own minutes, memos and telegrams, and the absence of replies (partly to avoid long wrangles about copyright), had the effect, as the cabinet secretary put it, of “creating the impression that no one but he ever took an initiative”.

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And the choice of title – The Second World War rather than War Memoirs – enhanced the sense that Churchill’s personal story enfolded the whole global conflict. The hardback sold 2 million copies in Britain and a similar number in the US. And Churchill’s take on the war reached even larger audiences around the world through book translations and newspaper serialisations.

That was not the end of Churchill’s history-making – only the end of the beginning. Before his death in 1965, he commissioned an official biography, based on privileged access to his papers. His son, Randolph, authored the first two volumes before his own death in 1968; the work was completed by the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert, with the eighth and final volume appearing in 1988.

The furrows that Churchill had dug through the war were deepened further by 23 volumes of documents, a project started by Gilbert and rounded off by wealthy acolytes in the US. Screen portrayals of the 1930s and the war also kept him centre-stage, initiated by Robert Hardy in the ITV series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1981, for which Gilbert was co-scriptwriter.

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Later depictions featured Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm, 2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour, 2017). Popular biographies took the same approach, encapsulated by Boris Johnson’s entertaining contribution, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (2014).

Creating an icon

As historians Allen Packwood and Warren Dockter have observed: “Churchill the writer played a key role in creating Churchill the icon,” adding that “ironically, in doing so he also raised his own profile to such a level that challenges to his reputation became inevitable.”

Even before Churchill died, an edited version of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, wartime chief of the Imperial General Staff, revealed some of the challenges of working with this volatile genius. Within a year of Churchill’s death his doctor, Lord Moran, went into print with Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, provoking a storm of controversy about the ethics of a physician writing about his patient.

And in 1970, Robert Rhodes James, formerly one of Randolph’s research assistants, published a biography of Churchill up to the Second World War. In it he argued that, had Churchill died in 1939, his life would have been deemed A Study in Failure. Seen that way, the war premiership stood out as an aberration.

Like any historical personage, over time Churchill was becoming a figure of controversy, and the mass of documents published by the Churchillians fed the debate, both for and against. In any case, historical perspectives inevitably shift with time.

Mo Mowlam, his BBC champion in 2002, was born in 1949. For people of that generation, and for those who lived through the war, the conflict still seemed all too present – not least in the urban wastelands and prefab housing that bore witness to the Blitz in many cities, and in the emotional power of Remembrance Sunday.

Yet for ‘Gen Z’, born in the late 1990s and 2000s, the Second World War can seem almost prehistoric. Britain today is far more ethnically diverse than the predominantly white country led by Churchill in 1940–45, largely the result of postwar immigration from the former British empire.

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Earlier statistics are not precise, but census returns for the past few decades show that the proportion of people in England and Wales identifying themselves as ‘white’ fell from 91.3 per cent in 2001 to 81.7 per cent in 2021, by which time 9.3 per cent of residents described themselves as Asian, 4 per cent as black and 2.9 per cent as mixed race.

Although many of these people had been born in Britain, they often had a different sense of their heritage from Mowlam’s generation, influenced by parents or grandparents who grew up in the Caribbean or south Asia.

In recent years, there has been a passionate debate about India’s war. For that nation, the focal wartime trauma was not the Blitz but the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which killed perhaps 3 million.

Causes and contributing factors are complex and hard to balance, including floods, crop disease and wartime inflation in Bengal, the disastrous fall in rice imports after Japan’s conquest of Burma, the slow reaction of the British authorities, and the shortage of shipping in 1943–44 because of the Allied build-up for D-Day.

But in Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (2010), Indian-American journalist Madhusree Mukerjee blamed much of the policy failure on the PM. Churchill’s contempt for what he called (privately) in February 1945 the “foul race” of Hindus was noted by many British politicians and officials of the time, and drove his conviction that Indians were not capable of self-government.

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The debate was fanned anew by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the UK after 2019. Accusations of genocide were levelled at Churchill, and his statue in London’s Parliament Square was daubed with “was a racist”. Churchillians offered robust defence, but the anti-Churchill polemics – often based on ignorance of the detailed story – remind us that heroes can easily be turned into villains as perspectives change.

A rival perspective

It’s often said that Churchill’s attitude to India was just part of the mental baggage of Victorian England. A glance at Clement Attlee, his successor as PM in 1945, offers a useful corrective. In fact, examining Attlee’s rise to power provides an intriguing perspective on Churchill’s world view.

Churchillians offered robust defence, but the anti-Churchill polemics – often based on ignorance of the detailed story – remind us that heroes can easily be turned into villains as perspectives change

Born in 1883 – thus also a Victorian, though eight years younger than Churchill – Attlee grew up in a prosperous professional family in the south-west London suburb of Putney. Whereas Churchill’s imperialist ideology was shaped by service as a soldier on the frontiers of Victoria’s empire, Attlee’s crucible was London’s East End.

Attlee lived in a social work settlement for nearly a decade before the First World War. This opened his eyes to urban deprivation, but also to the potential of many adolescents in London’s docklands if given discipline and motivation. He became a lifelong socialist.

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Unlike many Labour men of that era, Major Attlee was no pacifist. He served as an officer in the Gallipoli campaign and on the western front. But he was not an imperial diehard like Churchill, who never set foot in India after the 1890s. Two extended tours around the Raj with a parliamentary delegation in 1928–29 convinced Attlee that India must follow Australia and New Zealand along the path to self-government and eventual independence. And he acted on that conviction as prime minister in 1945–51.

With the death of Churchill in January 1965, Attlee penned a reflective tribute, judging him to have been “the greatest leader in war this country has ever known”. Not because he was the greatest warrior or strategist, but because “he was able to solve the problem that democratic countries in total war find crucial and may find fatal: relations between the civil and military leaders.”

Attlee had in mind the 1914–18 feuds between ‘Frock Coats’ and ‘Brass Hats’, but maybe also the ‘Bonapartist’ tendency of successful war leaders to seize political power. When Churchill put himself before the electorate in 1945 and was resoundingly defeated, he accepted their verdict, despite deep resentment at being kicked out.

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Attlee regretted the fact that Churchill did not retire from politics in 1945. “I had seen enough of him during the war to be sure that, unless there was a war on, he would not make much of a prime minister,” he wrote. Instead, “what Britain required when the war was over was an architect, somebody who could build new parts into our society, and repair damage.”

Attlee was, of course, positioning himself as the architect trying to repair the damage of two world wars and rebuild British society on socialist lines.

Both Churchill and Attlee were deeply patriotic, but they differed about the essence of national greatness. For Winston it was the empire, whereas Clem saw imperial overstretch as an outdated burden. Despite the eventual bloodbath over the partition of India, Attlee was proud of bringing the Raj to what he saw as a long-overdue end, and of helping transform empire into Commonwealth.

At home, what mattered for him was the concept of social security he had evolved in the East End, and “the duty of the state to act as the coordinating factor in making all individual effort work for the good of the citizen”. Commonwealth and socialism defined his sense of what it meant for Britain to be great.

In this piece I’ve emphasised the importance of seeing Churchill in context – against the wider dynamics of the Second World War and in relation to his contemporaries. Back in the 1890s, Rudyard Kipling rebuked those who held a myopic view of English history: “What should they know of England who only England know?”

Adapting Kipling, we might ask today: “What should they know of Churchill who only Churchill know?”

By definition, a biography tends to isolate its subject as good or bad. Placing a leader in context is surely the task of any historian. For me, the question of who was the greatest ever Briton makes no sense. But I’ve no doubt that, in his ‘finest hour’, Winston Churchill did win the immortality he craved.

David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (William Collins, 2023)

This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine