Churchill called Gandhi, whom he had once met, “a half-naked fakir,” and in speeches throughout England in 1931 he reiterated his warning of a bloodbath in India if the British pulled out. Baldwin, who liked Churchill personally, reached out to make him stop, but Churchill seemed to redouble his efforts, creating a breach that could not be healed.
In the summer of the same year, the Labour government collapsed and formed a coalition with the Tories and Stanley Baldwin. But by now there was no room for Churchill in the government, and the feeling was mutual. Never a “team player,” he told his son Randolph he wanted no part of a party that was trying to give up India. Churchill maintained his “safe seat” in Essex, but retired to Chartwell to paint, build, enjoy his family, and chase butterflies.16
Always in need of money, at the end of 1931 Churchill and Clementine sailed to the United States where he was to write and give lectures—a trip that almost became the end of him. On December 12, on his way to a dinner at Bernard Baruch’s, he was crossing Fifth Avenue and momentarily forgot that Americans drive on the right side of the road. He failed to look to the right and was immediately struck hard by a car that dragged him fifty feet and left him in a heap in the cold street. A crowd gathered. Although bleeding heavily from a scalp wound that cut to the bone, Churchill reassured the distraught driver of the car that it was not his fault, that he had failed to look before crossing. An inch or so either way and the accident could easily have been fatal.
A taxi took him to nearby Lenox Hill Hospital, where the staff refused to admit him without proof of payment. Clementine was phoned, and she rushed in with a New York detective who had been assigned to protect Churchill. In addition to the scalp gash, he was cut badly on both thighs and had two broken ribs that were especially painful. Ever a man to turn a buck, as soon as he was able Churchill propped himself up in bed and began scribbling “My New York Misadventure,” which ran on the front page of the Daily Mail and garnered him the equivalent of nearly $50,000 in today’s money.17
Outwardly Churchill tried to appear as if the ordeal of the accident was over. But from Clementine, his friends knew otherwise. Brendan Bracken took up a collection to buy him a car, which he thought might cheer Winston up. They got him a sleek, expensive Daimler. Some were waiting at the rail station when he disembarked from the train singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Churchill smiled but his eyes filled with tears. He bowed his head and sobbed.18
* * *
CHURCHILL NOW WAS ENTERING what has been popularly described as his wilderness years: the near decade when he continued to be an elected member of Parliament but remained out of government office, even when the Tories came back to power. It gave him more time to write, of course, and his productivity was astonishing. He finished the three-volume history of his great ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, as well as contracting to write his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for which he received an advance from the publisher Cassell of nearly $1 million in today’s money. He also wrote numerous popular histories on subjects great and small (usually ghostwritten by his secretary for a set percentage fee) as well as scores of magazine and newspaper articles. He became, in fact, one of the most popular writers in England.
Churchill lived at Chartwell with his painting and bricklaying, his farm animals and gardens. He even built a heated swimming pool. He described his life there as idyllic, “with my happy family around me…at peace within my habitation.” It might well have been so, especially in retrospect (these reflections were written twenty-five years later). But it was also a period of dark angst for a man so accustomed to having power. According to the biographer Roy Jenkins, there was “a sense of political impotence, of his talents wasted, of time passing him by.” There also may have been periods of the “black dog,” or depression, and of drinking too much.19
During his visits to Parliament in this period, Churchill never desisted in his rants against the government promising India autonomy, until 1935, when the House at last passed an India home rule bill. By then he had taken up a new subject that was fraught with far more danger and controversy: the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and the rearming of Germany.
* * *
IN 1925, WHEN CHURCHILL was in the midst of writing his multivolume history of World War I, The World Crisis, there appeared in print a book by a failed thirty-six-year-old Austrian artist and former corporal in the defeated German army: Adolf Hitler. Written while he was in jail for trying to overthrow the democratic government, Mein Kampf was Hitler’s blueprint for the Nazi takeover of Germany and the restoration of its rightful place in the world order. Within a few years the book would be a staple in nearly every German home.
While the Allied-sanctioned Weimar government tried to break Germany out of its economic depression, astronomical monetary inflation, and dangerous Communist agitation, Hitler began organizing his Brown Shirt military order along the lines of Mussolini’s Fascist Black Shirts, which had taken over Italy. Hitler’s speeches were filled with vitriol for the Allies, who had defeated the Germans, with special attention given to Germany’s Jews who, according to Hitler, were either behind the “sabotage” of the German army in 1918 or behind the Communists—or both.
As they gained seats each year in the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, the Nazis were likewise gaining strength in membership and secretly building a large military force in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler seized power in 1933, vowing to overturn the humiliating treaty. His first overt act was to march an armed force into the Rhineland between France and Germany, which had been demilitarized under the treaty.
The Allies did nothing, prompting Churchill to warn the House of Commons: “Five years ago, all felt safe; five years ago all were looking forward to peace…Five years ago to talk of war would have been regarded not only as a folly and a crime, but almost as a sign of lunacy.”20
It was too true. Not just in England, but in the lands of all the Allies, a spirit of profound exhaustion had languished with respect to the idea of another war. The prestigious Oxford Union debating society voted 275 to 153 a motion “that this House declines under any circumstances to fight for King or Country.”
The verdict was not surprising. By this point, a rash of British war poets, novelists, and memoirists had depicted the squalor of the trenches and the horrors of the war so vividly that it stamped a lasting impression not only on their contemporaries but upon an entirely new generation. They read and recoiled from the poetry of British army lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon:
The rank and stench of those bodies haunts me still
And I remember things I’d best forget.
Or Lieutenant Edmund Blunden:
The shell struck right in the doorway…
There were six men in that doorway.
Or Lieutenant Wilfred Owen:
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
and floundering around like a man in fire or lime.
Or the anonymous barracks ditty, “The Bells of Hell”:
The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you, but not for me.
Or Wilfred Owen again:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,…
My friend, you would not tell with such high jest
To Children ardent for some desperate glory
That old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*6
They had read Robert Graves’s tales of dead men shot to rags hanging and rotting in the barbed wire, and of the utter futility of war in the German author Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated All Quiet on the Western Front. Such impressions were nearly universal from the writers who had served in the war, and they completely overwhelmed naive notions of patriotism and glory as penned by young Lieutenant Rupert Brooke, who had served wi
th Churchill’s navy battalion at the very beginning of the war.
Patriotism, international outrage, even self-preservation were no longer ideals held by a majority of British citizens in the years following World War I; these sentiments influenced even the military budgets of the House of Commons. Parliament was especially stingy, given the horrid economics of the Great Depression years. But Churchill sought to moderate what was understandable with what had become an alarming new reality: a vengeful and aggressive Hitler, backed by a quickly rearming Nazi-run Germany, had become a world threat.
He sounded the warning in speech after speech. Intelligence indicated in 1933 that Britain was slipping dangerously behind Germany in airpower. Churchill may have overplayed his hand when he described London as “the greatest target in the world: a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow, tied up to attract the beast of prey.” He predicted that in a prolonged bombing attack, great parts of the city would be destroyed, and that thirty thousand to forty thousand people would be killed or wounded. He wasn’t far off the mark. But he was not only making people nervous; he was making them angry. His enemies called it “scaremongering.”21
Baldwin himself, the prime minister, thusly regaled a colleague of Churchill’s: “When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle bearing great gifts—imagination, eloquence, industry, ability—and then came a fairy who said, ‘No one person has the right to so many gifts,’ and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgment and wisdom. And that is why while we delight to listen to him in this House, we do not take his advice.”22
Churchill kept giving advice anyway—especially after Hitler felt strong enough to take over Austria, which was expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles, in 1938. Again, the Allied nations did nothing. Hitler obtained six Austrian infantry divisions on his side. The Nazis then demanded that all German-speaking countries be combined in a union, or Anschluss, with Germany. Because Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland had many German speakers its turn came next.
Churchill continued his eloquent harangues, hoping to kindle a spark in the cloak of apathy that lay across Britain like a London fog. Despite his efforts, the people remained war-weary, depression-weary, and warped in a kind of lethargy as colonial possessions began to agitate for their freedom and the Exchequer struggled to refinance its obligations and pay its debts. Under such circumstances the very idea of another war with Germany was so dreadful as to be unspeakable—even with the likes of Winston Churchill’s oratory. And so the world turned.
* * *
IN 1937 STANLEY BALDWIN HAD RETIRED. Neville Chamberlain, with his stiff wing tie, bowler hat, and bumbershoot, took his place. Hitler had made threatening moves against Czechoslovakia, citing the German-speaking population; leaders from England and France went to Munich for a conference with Hitler to see what could be done. In the end, there was nothing. Hitler promised it would be the end of his aggression in Europe, Chamberlain swallowed it, and he returned famously waving a piece of paper for reporters at the airport and proclaiming there would be “peace in our time.”
Churchill was furious, and he gave perhaps his best speech yet, in which, among other things, he asserted that “Britain has now sustained an unmitigated defeat.” He predicted that the Germans would soon swallow up the rest of the country: “Czechoslovakia now recedes into the darkness…All the countries of Central and Eastern Europe will make the best terms they can with the triumphant Nazi power.” And once they had been absorbed, “Hitler would begin to look westward.”
It all played out just as Churchill had predicted. On March 15, 1939, Hitler marched into Prague and took over the country, with its forty well-equipped infantry divisions and the giant Skoda armaments works.
With his dire warnings now seeming prophetic, Churchill was back in favor at home. But events abroad were now moving swiftly to a conclusion. Mussolini, declaring that democracy was dead, invaded and took Albania; Hitler began to threaten Poland, which Britain and France had guaranteed against German aggression. Britain ineffectually tried to enlist the Soviets in an alliance against Germany. But Hitler got there first with the German-Soviet nonaggression pact, which also provided for the Nazis and the Communists to divide up Poland between themselves.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and two days later Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. In just over a month, the Nazis and the Communists gobbled up Poland. There now ensued a period of inactivity known by journalists as the Phony War, while Hitler and Stalin digested their Polish prey.
Britain was now not only alarmed, it was at war. Chamberlain took Churchill into the government, giving him back his old job as first lord of the Admiralty. He was now nearly sixty-five years old, and he looked it. He had put on weight and gone bald; years of drinking and smoking cigars had taken their toll. But he flew into the Admiralty with almost supernatural energy that continued, electrifying and unabated, all through the next most difficult years of his life.
*1 Ebenezer Farm was the site, three years later, of a blood-drenched battle when a brigade of the famed U.S. 42nd Rainbow Division, under Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, attacked and ejected a German stronghold there that had overrun the British line during the huge and final German offensive of March 1918.
*2The rats were so voracious they quickly devoured the bodies of the dead before they could be buried. The army trucked in hordes of street cats from Paris and dumped them into the trenches, but the rats ate them too. The war ground on.
*3 Though neither artist ever rose above the category of “talented amateur” (or in Churchill’s case “exceptionally talented amateur”), Winston Churchill’s paintings today fetch upwards of $2 million at art auctions—whereas the best of Hitler’s work goes for around $100,000.
*4 Upwards of $2.8 million in today’s dollars.
*5 For two thousand years Indian society had been governed by a caste system, ranging from upper-class Brahmins, who were the intellectuals and priests, to Untouchables, who took out the garbage, with a variety of castes and subcastes in between. These were absolute. The caste you were born into was your lot in life.
*6 “It is sweet and good to die for your country.” Published posthumously.
Sir Randolph Churchill, in line to become the British prime minister, disgraced himself and lost the chance, prompting young Winston to go into politics.
Winston Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, of a wealthy American family, was one of England’s great beauties and used her considerable charms to prod powerful men into helping her son.
Lieutenant Winston Churchill, a champion polo player with his regiment in India, distinguished himself in his first battle.
Franklin Roosevelt’s mother, a member of the prominent Delano family, devoted herself to her son’s career and personal life after the early death of her husband.
Roosevelt’s father, James, shown here with Franklin (about two), was a wealthy industrialist whose health seriously declined in Franklin’s youth.
Franklin as a senior at Groton School, where “waterboarding” was among the prescribed punishments for misbehavior
Joseph Stalin as an Orthodox Catholic seminary student in 1894
A remarkably handsome police mug shot of Stalin, who was frequently arrested for Communist activities
Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina, who endured the brutish, drunken behavior of Stalin’s father until he deserted her when her son was fourteen. Stalin ostracized her when he became the Soviet premier.
Winston Churchill (right) walks with future prime minster David Lloyd George on Budget Day, 1910.
Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, with Admiral Jacky Fisher, first sea lord, who stabbed Churchill in the back over the Gallipoli operation
At his family home at Campobello, Roosevelt sits with Eleanor in A
ugust 1904, three months before their engagement.
Lucy Mercer (circa 1915), who became Roosevelt’s mistress and eventually the love of his life
Leon Trotsky, a prominent Communist who soon became Joseph Stalin’s rival
Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who became the father of communism in the Soviet Union
Stalin wears his civil war uniform as a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic in 1919.
In the garden of Stalin’s dacha, Svetlana Stalin sits on the lap of the murderous Lavrenty Beria, who headed the NKVD—the Soviet secret police—while Stalin works at a table in the background.
Stalin carries daughter Svetlana in the mid-1930s.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By 1921 Stalin was rapidly assuming control over the Communist Party in Russia as Lenin’s health began to deteriorate. Problems began three years prior, in the summer of 1918, when Lenin was leaving a factory in Moscow, and a young woman stepped up with a Browning pistol and fired three shots at him. One missed, but the other two knocked him to the ground, one bullet lodging in his neck and the other in his collarbone.*1 Lenin refused to go to a hospital for fear of more assassins, so he was taken instead to the Kremlin, where doctors decided it would be too dangerous to remove the bullets. They remained in his body the rest of his life.
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