Tag Archives: Churchill

10.29.24
by

Honor

Saturday, I will rise at zero-dark-thirty and fly to Washington, D.C., on Badger Honor Flight Mission #57.

Honor flights, in case  you don’t know, are group excursions by veterans to view the nation’s monuments and memorials in a context of pomp, circumstance, and profuse gratitude for their military service.

I never imagined I would take part in such a thing. 

My father, an infantryman in the Southwest Pacific during the Second World War, would have qualified for an honor flight, but it never occurred to me to sign him up; and then he died. 

I was only dimly aware that honor flights were a thing. If I knew of honor flights at all, I had heard of them only as a new thing, a phenomenon of the last twenty years. 

You probably know, Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer is suspicious of new things.

I’m also suspicious of events which, and people who, make a big deal of military service. During my time in the Air Force, 1965-1969, I was never an enthusiastic Zoomie. I have not been active in veterans’ affairs since then. 

Going on an honor flight would have been a bizarre thought for me. 

But my friend, the late Jerry Paulsen, went. He was an Army vet. His wife, Mary, also served in the Army, so the two were able to go together on the Badger Honor Flight. It turned out to be a life-changing experience for them. 

After the Paulsens returned from their honor flight, Jerry started hounding me to sign up for a flight myself. 

But I don’t do what people say just because they nag.

So, why did I sign up? I’ll try to explain.

#

“Honor” is a conspicuous word. It is the first word in the phrase “honor flight.” Maybe it’s used in the verbal sense, meaning the event is intended to honor the veterans who take part.

But “honor” also has another sense, a noun sense. It’s an old-fashioned meaning we don’t hear much about these days. Honor is a traditional virtue that was thought to be indispensable to a man’s character. 

Honor was applied to women, too, but it accrued on different accounts in the reckoning of the two sexes.

For men, honor was tied to valor and to unswerving loyalty demonstrated in battle. Though honesty and integrity are at its heart, the virtue of honor speaks with a martial accent. War is what commonly delineates male virtue, and our nation has generally provided one war per generation. 

Some men get born too late for one war, too early for the next. But most men get the opportunity to fight for their country. Some live in times when they can hardly escape it. It is not only how they acquit themselves in battle, but even how they meet the routine challenges of military life, that brightens or stains their escutcheon of honor.

Honor used to be a powerful motivator. In the Civil War, men did not rush upon one another in thousands, bayonets fixed, and perish in blood and pain because they wanted to do so or because it was fun. Everyone, as Lincoln noted, would have preferred to avoid war. But when it overtook  them, most able-bodied men found they could not stay out of it and keep their honor intact.

Socrates. Bust by Victor Wager, photo by Greg O’Beirne.  CC BY-SA 3.0. 

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates took death by poison rather than forfeit his honor as an Athenian. Socrates the philosopher explained to his friend Crito that Socrates the Athenian must obey the rulings of the city-state. If he was no Athenian, he could be no Socrates. This, although he does not use the word, was a form of honor.

Portrait of Grant around 1843, from a daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Public Domain.

The young lieutenant Ulysses Grant, convinced the 1846-1848 war with Mexico was an injustice done to a weaker neighbor to serve the political needs of the pro-slavery Democratic party, nevertheless followed orders and went. He was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army. To withdraw on the eve of war would amount to dishonor. 

Winston Churchill—a chesty man, never known to back away from a fight—told the boys at Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in—never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” (My emphasis.) Honor, Churchill seemed to say, would have you fight, fight, and never give in, except when honor itself happened to require the opposite.

Churchill in 1941. Photograph by Yousuf Karsh. Public Domain.

#

Since Churchill’s time, honor has been steeply discounted. 

We no longer covet honor. We no longer talk about honor. We no longer predicate our acts on conceptions of honor.

Still, there is residue. In World War II, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm, the U.S. forces were constituted of men who answered to the concept of honor, whether or not it was stated as such. 

By the time of the Vietnam involvement, Americans no longer uniformly believed our national honor depended on fighting a war—at least, not this war—or that it was worth the effort and risk of doing so. Thousands of young men fled to Canada or went into hiding in the United States. 

I had no wish to fight in a war, or even to serve in uniform, but events gave me little choice. I was soon to be drafted, which meant I would serve in the Army or the Marine Corps.

I chose to enlist in the Air Force. It seemed like a better deal. 

At the time, widespread public opposition to the Vietnam War was just starting to get organized.

But six months later, while I was still in training at the Presidio of Monterey, California, rejection of uniformed service had become a real thing. One guy I knew lodged a belated application to be treated as a conscientious objector. Another simply ran off—deserted. Antiwar activists hung around military bases, cultivating friendships with young enlisted men and offering options for clandestine flight. 

The opportunity to simply duck out of the war had become real. It could be done. It was an option we all had to address. 

I stayed the course. Not because I was brave. Not because I was patriotic. Because, rather, I could identify with Socrates, who chose to remain an Athenian in good standing. I wanted to keep on being an American. I would not have expressed that as honor, but looking back from sixty years on, perhaps it was.

#

The young men who fought the Vietnam War sometimes endured taunts and jeers when they came home. I did not experience such things, but many did.

Previously, when Johnny came marching home, he had been received with honor, even with brass bands and parades. But combatants in the Vietnam War were made to feel like inferior life forms. That war and its consequences undermined the caliber and morale of the armed services. President Nixon reached an agreement with the North Vietnamese which amounted to surrender but was termed “peace with honor.” Everybody just wanted to get the hell out.

Then fifteen years passed—a mere eye-blink—and our nation again needed well-trained, capable, and loyal forces, for operations against Iraq. Our leaders resolved that this time around, the troops would be celebrated, would be given dignity and respect. And so, by and large, they were.

There came a general rise in patriotic feeling and a restored regard for military men. These trends were bolstered by our national response to the events of September 11, 2001. All veterans, not just those of Desert Storm, basked in the elevated profile of military service. 

In 2004, a National World War II Memorial was built in Washington, D.C. Living veterans of that war were getting older, reaching the end of life; so volunteer organizations sprang up to whisk World War II veterans to Washington so they could see their memorial. This project grew into a nationwide network, which is now active in forty-five states. 

As members of the Greatest Generation slipped off to their final rewards, the Honor Flight network began including younger veterans in the trips, Korean- and Vietnam-era vets. 

I was dimly aware of all these things. But then Jerry Paulsen came back from his honor flight and began harping at me to sign up. So one day, I idly went to the Badger Honor Flight web page to see how the whole thing worked. What I saw there transformed my attitude.

The honor flight protocol assigns each honored veteran a volunteer “guardian,” a younger person at his elbow throughout the trip. According to the website, “We do this for the safety and accountability of our Veterans. The most important reason is to ensure each Veteran can enjoy their ‘Trip of a Lifetime’ to its fullest.” Maybe they want to give needed assistance to aged and infirm veterans yet do not wish to create a distinction between those and the healthier vets.

The key fact to me was that the guardian, though he or she cannot be the veteran’s spouse, can be a family member. I thought of our only child—our daughter, Katie. 

Katie is a very bright young woman, now in her late forties, with children of her own and an important job with the State of Wisconsin. Through no fault of her own, she was born after the brouhaha surrounding the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam was all over. She had never lived  in a time of war. The Gulf War and the Global War on Terror had come along, of course, when she was an adult—but they had little effect on her personally. 

If I went on this trip and took Katie as my guardian—I knew she would do that for her old man—she would receive a precious opportunity to mingle for a day, a meaningful day, with a lot of old men all focused on key events of their young lives. These men might tell stories. They might reveal how things were in those old days. 

At the very least, she would experience a certain group reverence and team spirit among a body of men and women who may not all have been in battle, but all of whom have a DD Form 214 in their pockets and know how to use a P-38 government-issue can opener. I thought that when all these guys and gals pay hushed respects at monuments and memorials to their fallen brothers and sisters, Katie might sense that something important was involved. 

She might get a glimpse of honor cherished and salvaged, by being among folks grown old in body but still engaged in vexing moments that once occupied their young lives. “. . . made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For that alone—to give her that opportunity—it will be worth the trip. 

Have no fear of missing out, Gentle Reader: I’ll bloviate my impressions of the actual thing next week in this spot, Lord willing.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

07.30.24
by

The Sentence

Red-winged blackbird. Photo by ADJ82, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Consider:

Birds swooped over the prairie—black birds with red stripes on their wings, lemon-breasted birds that teetered on tall grass stems burbling out notes of joy.

That’s a sentence from page 52 of my first novel, Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation, describing the scene that greets Anders Gunstensen when he arrives on the Illinois frontier in 1853. Anders, having grown up in Norway, does not know the names of American birds. He only knows how they look and sound—and that’s what I was trying to capture.

When I wrote it, I thought it was a pretty ordinary, workmanlike sentence. But of the thousands of sentences in the book, this is the one that pierced the heart of a reader.

A Loved Sentence

We were at the gala book launch for my new middle-grade book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, and Stephanie Hofer, the mother of our former next-door neighbor, approached me to get my signature on her copy of the former book, Price of Passage. 

She made a point of showing me that sentence, which she had starred and underlined on page 52 of her copy. 

“I just loved that sentence!” Stephanie said. 

She did not say she observed, admired, respected, or judged that sentence extremely well-wrought.

She loved it. 

Gentle Reader, there are not too many rewards in this author game. Most of us do not get famous, and heaven knows we make no money at it. We have to take our satisfactions where we can. When a reader truly connects with something I’ve written, it thrills me to my core. This is why we write—to connect with another soul.

Eastern meadowlark singing. Photo by Gary Leavens, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.

Stephanie grew up on the Great Plains, where there are miles and miles of tall-grass meadows filled with red-winged blackbirds and meadowlarks. “I remember seeing meadowlarks,” she said.

I am a city boy myself, even though my cities have always been small or medium-sized ones. But my in-laws used to have a place in the country near Dodgeville, Wisconsin. We would go out there on weekends to relax. About that time of my life I got interested in birds and spent many hours on their wooded hillside and the adjacent grassy meadows, binoculars in hand, early mornings or late afternoons.

Many’s the time I’ve been greeted by a spontaneous burst of enthusiasm from a meadowlark perched on the thinnest of stems, just a foot or two above the prairie. That’s what I was thinking of when I imagined Anders the Norwegian tramping across the Upper Midwestern farmlands for the first time. 

I knew exactly what I was describing, and Stephanie knew it, too.

Majestic Sentences

I am a writer, and justly proud of my sentences. In the book Stephanie asked me to sign, I planted a few corkers. For instance: 

This time of year, the cold earth fights you for every chunk of granite you try to pull up (page 2).

Or how about: 

She seized Anders’ head with both hands, as an eagle grips a big fish (page 10).

Or who could forget:

He studied how to wear his blue uniform, how to tilt the hat, how to tie the neckerchief; how and when to salute an officer, how to stand at attention, how to speak with “aye-aye” and “sir” in every sentence; how to call things by naval words—decks, bulkheads, hatches, fore and aft, starboard and larboard, abaft and abeam; how to give proper respect to every officer and petty officer; how to tell time in bells and speed in knots (page 281).

But the one that endeared the book to Stephanie Hofer was the simple one on page 52 about prairie birds.

So What?

Sometimes a single sentence may endear a story to a reader. The part vouches for the whole. And you never know which sentence it will be.

Therefore it behooves a writer to pay attention to sentences, to try to craft each one as well as it can be written. 

Winston S. Churchill, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, famously wrote in a memoir:

The young Winston Churchill. Public Domain.

“[B]y being so long in the lowest form I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. They all went on to learn Latin and Greek and splendid things like that. But I was taught English. We were considered such dunces that we could learn only English. Mr. Somervell—a most delightful man, to whom my debt is great—was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English. He knew how to do it. He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practised continually English analysis. . . . Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.” 

It’s hard to think that Sir Winston was less than brilliant, even as a boy. But there can be little doubt that learning to write sentences was a key to his great success. 

Go thou and do likewise, Dear Reader.

Blessings, 

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

07.02.24
by

Londinium

Henry Van Dyke wrote, “London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air. . . .”

Maybe that’s why 177,000 people troop down to Buckingham Palace every morning to see the Changing of the Guard.

Panoply of power: Buckingham Palace. Photo by Chiugoran, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

What happens, over a period of forty-five minutes: Some guys in red coats and tall black hats perform various ministry-approved silly walks while a couple of bands play brassy songs, some other guys troop through on horseback, and dark-suited policemen in lime yellow day-glow vests yell at the hoi polloi to get down off the fences. 

Changing of the Guard, a worm’s-eye view. Photo by Jo Sommers, used by permission.

That’s power.

All these people would be doing other—more sensible—things, were it not for the heady aroma of power emanating from Buckingham Palace. That’s because the king lives there.

The main part of London is chockablock with gargantuan buildings in marble and other heavy stones. The Houses of Parliament stand for tradition and the vox populi. Westminster Abbey weds sanctimony with magisterial authority. The Tower of London has nine hundred years of experience as the enforcement branch. Endless corridors of bureaucratic power stack up along Whitehall.

Whitehall. Photo by VirtuallyLondonBecky, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

And it’s all watched over by the unsleeping London Eye. 

The London Eye never sleeps. Photo by Diego Delso, delso.photo, License CC-BY-SA.

Even a strong man might get vertigo.

A Chequered Past

Londinium was established about 47 A.D. by the Romans, who knew a thing or two about power. After a brief destruction by the Iceni under Queen Boudica, the city was rebuilt and grew rapidly in subsequent decades. 

Under the Romans, “Londinium was an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from across the Roman Empire, including natives of Britannia, continental Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa,” according to Wikipedia. 

This cosmopolitan city was infiltrated and overrun by the Saxons over several centuries’ time, captured by Vikings for a few years, and eventually incorporated into Alfred the Great’s Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in 886. 

The year 1066 saw the introduction of Norman law, customs, and language. The next nine hundred years or so crystallized the existence of a distinct Englishness that spawned a world-wide empire with leaders like Nelson, Wellington, and Churchill.

In the process, “being English”—or even “being British,” a broader label—was distilled into an essentially white and Anglo-Saxon identity.

Then, the World Changed

By the middle of the twentieth century, the British Empire (“Im-paahh,” in Etonian/Oxonian) was impoverished and exhausted. It was hard enough to hold the British Isles together, let alone India, Kenya, and the bloody Irish. The Empire was reduced to a “Commonwealth” of nations sharing a nostalgic attachment. 

Natives of Commonwealth and other nations increasingly migrated to London for economic opportunity, and the same thing that has happened to other major cities happened to London as well. It became jumbled up, ethnographically.

When Joelle and I visited in the early 1970s, the typical Londoner was pretty much the man or woman we had seen on our television tubes—a blend of Stanley Holloway, Robert Donat, and Mrs. Miniver. A few Indian restaurants were the only visible outposts of brownness. 

Today, fifty years later, London is alive with Britishers of all races, colors, and national origins. Stand on a street corner near Victoria Station, and in ten minutes you will see everybody in the world walk by. London has again become “an ethnically diverse city with inhabitants from” . . . just about everywhere.

Roger Miller would hardly recognize it.

The London Eye may never sleep, but the Big Wheel of History rolls on regardless.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.06.24
by

Those Detestable Christians!

Or, SUMMA CONTRA BUMPTIOSI

Saint Michael and the Angels at War with the Devil, Painting, tempera on panel, by Domenico Ghirlandaio  (1448–1494). Public Domain.

AN OLD FRIEND—a man I have known casually for more than fifty years, one to whom I am kindly disposed because he once did me a great service—recently posted this verbal meme:

Thought for the Day: It kills me that Christians insist everyone else honor their religious sensitivities while they stomp all over others!

A thought leapt to my mind, a mirror of the meme itself: “Atheists demand we honor their religious sensitivities, which seem to require the indiscriminate slander of Christians!”

Striving to resist a knee-jerk reaction to my old friend’s provocation, I read on. Some of his Facebook followers had added comments, most of which echoed the anti-Christian meme. 

One commenter let loose a 12-gauge blast in five extended paragraphs. Pared down to its essentials: “. . . Lutheran, Baptist, ‘evangelical’, and ‘non-denominational’ were all about the same: hypocritical. . . . I believe people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion. . . . As I saw once on a bumper sticker, ‘Religion is the Problem’.”

#

Whew. 

Time to take a deep breath.

This blog generally avoids religion and politics, for good reasons. But Your New Favorite Writer is always concerned with the past and how it echoes in the present. My old friend’s bumptious meme fetches up undead beasts from the past that continue to haunt us today—to our great common detriment.

So, now: To the barricades!

#

First, people have a right to cast aspersions on Christianity. That right I do not contest. It is guaranteed, in our land, by the First Amendment—whether such sentiments are spurred by generous or spiteful impulses.

So, the critics have the right to criticize.

But where do they get the moral standing, the breadth of outlook, and the depth of knowledge to swing their clubs with such casual malice?

These are questions of import, which I do not ask lightly. Thus, Kind Reader, I beg your indulgence as we explore the topic in some depth, at a leisurely pace.

We may as well begin with the grey squirrel, a shining emblem of moral deficiency.

Grey squirrel. Photo by Phil Sellens, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The Grey Squirrel


Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not

all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.

The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and

loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.

-- Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940)
Humbert Wolfe. Drawing by William Rothenstein, 1931. Public Domain.

It is mistaken, of course, to state that grey squirrels eat red-brown squirrels; in fact they do not. But Humbert Wolfe, a Christian poet with Jewish roots, wants us to understand that the grey squirrel, in any case, cannot measure up to a Christian standard of morality. He also points out, with wit, that a Christian may not measure up to his own standard of morality. 

This goes to the question of moral hypocrisy implied by my old friend’s meme and posed explicitly by the agitated commenter.

But, wait. Why are we all today, Christians and anti-Christians alike, so obsessed with morality? 

Jesus, depicted by an unknown artist on the wall of the 4th-century catacomb of Commodilla in Rome. Public Domain.

It seems to me we did not talk so urgently about morality before this fellow Jesus of Nazareth came along and made such a point of it in his teachings.

But I am digressing, I fear, into religious talk.

#

Far be it from me, Dear Reader, to dwell on the theological basis of all those moral laws we have come to consider purely secular because they seem so dazzlingly self-evident. I merely mention this in passing, in case it is of any interest; for many things that are self-evident now only became so after long firing in the crucible of humanity’s tortured experience.

Rather than dwell on that, let us examine our propensity to evade morality whenever convenient.

Let me ask my old friend and his Facebook choristers: Do you suppose that in the whole sad parade of human inadequacy, it is Christians alone who have cornered the market on hypocrisy? 

Must we assume that pagans, animists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Shintoists, Stoics, Epicureans, pragmatists, utilitarians, agnostics, or atheists always live up to their stated ideals? 

Of course not. 

Hypocrisy is a human failing, not a Christian one.

#

What can we take from this? That high ideals are pointless?

That’s absurd. Without moral aspirations, what will become of us?

Fair Reader, what we are left with is the fallible human animal: Someone who needs to hope to be good, yet who always falls short.

So when you fall short, do you give up? 

Winston Churchill—a man well-acquainted with failure, with repeated and spectacular failure—once advised young boys as follows:

“. . .  never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”  

Churchill at Harrow, 1941

Most of us, however, lack Churchill’s iron resolve. 

Where shall we find the sheer chutzpah to keep going in the face of our own shortcomings?

#

We need to draw from internal wells of humility. 

In pursuit of that thought, I must beg to differ with the commenter who said, “people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion.” 

People may be worsened by religion, indeed. But then, we are not intrinsically good to start with. 

Richard Mansfield starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in both New York and London. Double exposure photo by Henry Van der Weyde, 1895.

Life is not that simple. People are not wholly good nor wholly bad. Abundant experience shows that we are both good and bad: At the same time. 

We are mixed beings, angels and devils at once. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

Good and evil so commonly appear bound together in one person that it baffles me how anyone of mature years can have failed to notice that duality. 

We have various names for it. We call it inconsistency, perversity, or sheer cussedness. But by any name, its existence is undeniable.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

—James Truslow Adams

We desperately need to recognize this fact about our neighbors, and also about ourselves. It is not only the other guy who is a mixed being. As Pogo, Walt Kelly’s famous Okefenokee possum, said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

What has that to do with humility, and what has humility to do with anything?

One of the best and worst persons I ever knew was a colleague, back in the days when I exerted myself to make a living. Tim, raised a Catholic, had become a theoretical agnostic and a practical atheist. He projected the Self-Made Man, relying entirely on his own talents and exertions. This happened to be a good strategy for Tim, because he was intelligent, capable, and hard-working. 

He was also curious about many topics, including American history. But it shocked him to learn that U.S. presidents, including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, have called for national days of prayer and humiliation. 

“How,” Tim asked me, “how can any president call for national humiliation?”

To him, “humiliation” suggested ignominy, disgrace, and something akin to unworthiness. 

I’m afraid I let him down in this hour of crisis. 

Given enough time, I might have stumbled through an explanation that America has always been steeped in Reform Christianity—or, in one word, Puritanism. The Founding Fathers, even those who were not Puritans, grew up in a Christian world that assumed a universal need to repent of our transgressions; to recant any claims to pride; to be brought low by prayerful introspection. And this process of becoming appropriately humble—since we all have a bit of the Devil in us—was called “humiliation.” 

Given enough time, I might have explained all that. But Tim’s question was posed in passing, on a typically busy day. So he went to his grave without ever hearing my (possibly tedious and long-winded) explanation. In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, the God I know would not hold this  human lack of information against him. 

And suddenly, with no warning, we have arrived at the central point.

If we think we understand everything, we are grossly mistaken. We need more humility than that. 

It’s true that Christians have often fallen short of our ideals. One of the ways we fall short of our ideals is by trying to force our views on others. 

It is wrong to suggest, as the meme does, that all Christians always do this. But some of us do, sometimes.

Some non-Christians, and some anti-Christians, also do this sometimes. 

Even when we are at our worst, Christians are no worse than other people when they are at their worst. 

A terrible frailty is part of the human condition. Puritans called it “original sin.”

If you think it does not apply to you—whatever you may like to call it—I invite you to think again.

#

At the beginning of this essay I said the man who posted the bumptious anti-Christian meme on Facebook was an old friend. And so he is. 

How I can treasure my old friendship with one who blithely flaunts such a clouded and limited vision of the world? 

Let me tell you, Fair Reader: Many years ago, this same man taught me how to ward off airsickness—a terrible occupational hazard to a young airman. That teaching was the act of an angel. Without it, I would have been condemned to great misery in the course of military duty.

I also happen to be conscious that I have made my own share of foolish declarations.

We ought to try, as best we can, to show the world our clarity and our charity, not our presumptuous hobgoblins of prejudice. 

Yet we can’t always manage that. 

The Season of Lent approaches, and we require humiliation, in the old sense of the word.

Unless we cultivate enough humility to cut one another a bit of slack, how shall we ever find our way to the light?

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

11.07.23
by

Churchill’s Destiny

Winston Churchill was prime minister of the United Kingdom when I was a boy. That was during his second of two stints in the top job, 1951-1955. The first had been ten years earlier, during the Second World War. 

I saw Churchill as a distinguished, therefore stuffy, personage, because he was old, wore funny clothes, smoked big cigars, and was called “sir.” 

Distinguished he was. But stuffy? Assuredly not.

I have just worn myself out reading Andrew Roberts’s 982-page tome Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Roberts mines a huge lode of facts, stories, recollections, inferences, opinions, and quotes to sketch a stunning and well-rounded portrait of this remarkable statesman. Churchill became the giant of the twentieth century by being the quintessential nineteenth-century man. 

Oldman as Churchill. Fair use.

We have seen Churchill twice in recent years: As the unbeatable war leader brought to life by Gary Oldman in the film Darkest Hour (2017), and as the aged lion embodied by John Lithgow in the Netflix TV series The Crown (2016 and later). Both performances were first-rate. 

But they were performances. Roberts’s book fills in the actual dimensions of Churchill’s greatness. If I sketch that story for you here, you won’t have to read the Roberts book—unless you happen to be afflicted, like me, with History-Reading Syndrome (HRS).

Winston Spencer Churchill was born in 1874, at the height of the Victorian era. His place of birth was Blenheim Palace, ancestral seat of the Dukes of Marlborough.

Blenheim Palace. Photo by Dreilly95, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a reckless, meteoric figure in British  politics, was disdainful toward the boy, treating him with such coldness as ought to have wilted his self-esteem. But Winston’s self-esteem was unwiltable. 

Born into the top tier of British society and immune to any middle-class self-doubt, Churchill set out in 1897, when he was 23, to “devote my life to the preservation of this great Empire and to trying to maintain the progress of the English people.” 

He was a champion of tradition and old-fashioned Englishness. He never thought to apologize for defending the British Empire, the concept of noblesse oblige, the “white man’s burden,” and his exalted notion of the destiny of “the English-speaking peoples”—under which rubric he included not only the Commonwealth nations but the United States as well. 

2nd Lieutenant Winston Churchill of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars in 1895. Public Domain.

After attending Harrow, one of England’s leading public schools, Churchill skipped university studies and joined the Army. He trained at Sandhurst and served as a young officer in India, then Egypt and Sudan. Less than two years later he fought the Boers in South Africa while also serving as a war correspondent for the Morning Post of London.

Churchill in 1900, when he first won a seat in Parliament. Public Domain.

Having gained fame through his newspaper dispatches, he stood for election to the House of Commons. From 1901 onward, Winston Churchill, enfant terrible of the aristocracy, rambunctius and irrepressible, tilted at every available windmill in the high councils of British government. He changed positions, contradicted himself, fought his own party, even crossed the floor twice to join the opposition. People marked him down as a self-seeking opportunist.

He made a serious study of oratory and mastered the art thoroughly. He was the embodiment of active energy, indefatigable, as willing to battle over trifles as over the great issues of the day. Almost everyone who knew him thought him brilliant, and everyone did know him. 

He was obviously destined to be prime minister someday, if only one could trust his judgment. Like his father, Winston was liked, respected, and feared, yet seen as erratic. 

Lieutenant-Colonel Winston Churchill, center, commanding the 6th Battalion, The Royal Scots Fusiliers, in the lines behind Ploegsteert in Belgium, circa 1916. Public domain.

He believed his life would be short; therefore he was in a rush to achieve greatness. He was pushy and intransigent. As first lord of the Admiralty in the First World War, he browbeat his naval colleagues into supporting an invasion of Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula. It made strategic sense,  but in execution it was a ghastly failure costing 250,000 caualties. Winston resigned the Admiralty and went to France to serve as a junior Army officer in the trenches.

For decades, whenever Winston seemed on the brink of political success, people would whisper,  “Remember Gallipoli,” and he would be passed over. He became an embarrassment to the government, which was run by his Conservative colleagues. 

When Hitler came to power and started re-arming Germany, Winston warned incessantly of the need to confront him. Neville Chamberlain’s Tory government followed a deliberate plan of appeasement, allowing Hitler to claim more and more European territory. Chamberlain was not alone; appeasement was blessed and praised by the whole British establishment. Only Churchill and a few sidekicks, though Tories and thus theoretically on Chamberlain’s team, spoke against it.

The Führer invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Chamberlain dithered for two days before declaring war, but when he did, he appointed a War Cabinet that included Churchill—ironically, in his former position as first lord of the Admiralty. For eight months Churchill toiled loyally in Chamberlain’s government. But by May 1940, Chamberlain had lost the confidence of the Labor Party. His wartime coalition dissolved and he had to resign. Viscount Halifax would have been Chamberlain’s logical successor, but Halifax had been a leading architect of appeasement. 

Lord Halifax, left, pays a visit to Hermann Göring in 1937. German Federal Archives, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de.

Churchill thus became inevitable. For a decade or more, his had been the only significant voice raised against appeasment. Only Churchill’s prodding had raised up a Royal Air Force with a bare chance of challenging German bombers. Now, against frightful odds, with France on the verge of collapse and Hitler on the march, King George VI asked Winston to form a government.

“The important point about Churchill in 1940,” says Roberts, “is not that he stopped a German invasion that year but that he stopped the British Government from making peace. If Churchill had not been prime minister, Halifax undoubtedly would have been, and he wanted at least to discover what Hitler’s terms might be.”

Churchill’s decades of practicing the art of public rhetoric now paid off. In speech after speech he gave voice to Britain’s desire not to be enslaved by a foreign power. The bred-in-the-bone aristocrat who defended tradition, yet who flouted convention, gained the ear of the man in the street. And people gave him their allegiance. 

There followed five years of Herculean effort. At the beginning of the war, Churchill had no idea how England would prevail; he knew only that it would. Because he knew this, everybody else knew it too. He welcomed Russia and the U.S., however tardily, into the war. Often irritated with his allies—Roosevelt, Stalin, and especially the insufferable Charles DeGaulle of France—he swallowed his pride again and again to preserve Allied harmony. 

Churchill, left, meets Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta in February 1945. Public Domain.

“The only occasions on which Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill were all together were at Teheran in 1943 and at Yalta in 1945. Yet Churchill and Roosevelt met on eleven occasions, and Churchill and Stalin on three, whereas Roosevelt and Stalin never met alone except on the margins of the two trilateral meetings. Churchill’s travels during the Second World War provided the glue that held the Big Three together.” So says Roberts in his concluding chapter, evaluating the sum and substance of Churchill’s impact.

As soon as the war was won, the British electorate turned out Churchill and his Tories, giving a mandate to the Labor Party under Clement Atlee. Churchill was philosophical. When a colleague spoke of the people’s ingratitude, he replied, “Oh, no. I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.” 

At seventy and out of office, Churchill found himself with time on his hands. He launched into writing The Second World War, six volumes of memoirs totalling 4,200 pages. This was a small fraction of his lifetime written output of 6.1 million words—more than Shakespeare and Dickens combined— in thirty-seven books, not to mention screenplays he wrote for Hollywood and the British film industry. It was his writing income, not government pay, that enabled Churchill to live a lifestyle widely noted for its extravagance.

Though short and incresingly rotund as the years went by, Churchill was large in every other respect. He wept at the drop of a tissue. He forgave betrayals by political friends and enemies, often appointing them to new positions where they might do better. 

His consumption of alcohol was not excessive so much as unceasing. A friend opined that Winston was not an alcoholic, because “no alcoholic could drink that much.”

He was a serious painter whose works sold for substantial sums. He derived great satisfaction from the craft of laying bricks, which he used to improve his home at Chartwell.

He was an expert on military subjects. In the First World War he was the father of the armored tank as well as the Gallipoli disaster. Later, in the early 1920s, he may have been the first politician to grasp the military significance of nuclear fission.

He confessed to making many mistakes but kept things in perspective. “I’ve done a lot of foolish things that turned out well,” he said, “and a lot of wise things that turned out badly.”

In 1951 he was returned to the office of prime minister and served until 1955, when he was eighty. Roberts sums up this period: “Churchill’s Indian Summer premiership had seen the end of the Korean War, a million houses built, the abolition of rationing, the end of austerity and the beginning of a return to prosperity. Britain had become a nuclear power; no part of the British empire had been liquidated; the Coronation [of Queen Elizabeth II] had been a great success, and Mount Everest had been conquered. In retrospect . . . the first half of the 1950s were something of a golden age for Britain, and at least some of the credit for that must go to the Prime Minister of the day.” 

The queen had offered him a dukedom in his own right, but he refused. He did, however, accept the Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of knighthood, having turned it down twice before. So in 1953 he became Sir Winston.

Health problems slowed him down. He resigned in 1955 but lived another ten years in retirement, dying at age ninety. 

So much for his fear that he would live a short life. The hurly-burly political warfare of his early years prepared him for major historic contributions, which all came after he was sixty-five.

And the causes he won, he won through stubborn, unflagging determination. In October 1941, addressing that year’s students at his old alma mater Harrow, he said—

Surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today. Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate. But instead our country stood in the gap. There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.

Something to think about.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer