Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was British prime minister in 1940–1945 and 1951–1955 and a central figure in the Allied coalition against Nazi Germany. He entered Parliament in 1900 after a career as a soldier and journalist. Initially a Conservative, he joined the Liberals in 1904, supporting free trade and social reform. As president of the Board of Trade and then home secretary, he helped develop measures that broadened the state’s responsibility for social welfare. ^{1, 2, 3}

His career also included major reverses. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he promoted the unsuccessful Dardanelles campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and lost his naval office. After returning to Conservative ranks, he served as chancellor of the exchequer from 1924 to 1929 and took Britain back onto the gold standard. In the 1930s he warned against German rearmament and the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, while his opposition to greater Indian self-government helped isolate him from his party’s leadership. ^{2, 3}

Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 after Neville Chamberlain’s resignation and sustained Britain’s resistance after the fall of France. He worked to obtain American support and forged a close relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their Atlantic Charter of August 1941 set out principles for a postwar international order. Despite his longstanding hostility to communism, Churchill supported the Soviet Union after Germany invaded it. At Yalta in February 1945, he joined Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin in decisions concerning occupied Germany, Poland and the future United Nations, as Britain’s relative power within the alliance diminished. ^{3, 4, 5}

His commitment to defeating Nazism coexisted with a determination to preserve the British Empire. Explaining the Atlantic Charter to the House of Commons in September 1941, he emphasized the restoration of sovereignty to European countries under Nazi occupation and treated constitutional change in India and other British territories as a separate question. His defense of imperial authority therefore placed limits on how he applied the language of self-government that Britain and the United States had jointly endorsed. ⁶

Labour’s victory in the 1945 election removed Churchill from office. His 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, warned of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and urged close cooperation among English-speaking countries. Returning as prime minister in 1951, he accepted much of the welfare state established by Labour while seeking a high-level meeting with Soviet leaders to ease Cold War tensions. Poor health contributed to his resignation in 1955. He also published histories of both world wars and received the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. ^{1, 3}