Churchill: Remember the man, not the myth. Part 7: Churchill was a peacemaker, not just a warrior

In part 7 of his series on the life and legacy of Sir Winston Churchill, Alastair Stewart explores the statesman’s role as a peacemaker.

Today is Sir Winston Churchill's birthday. As a Scot, the day also holds a special, and serendipitous appropriateness of being both Saint Andrew's Day (to say nothing of History Scotland being the home for this article in the first place). Given the day, I've included this piece as a bit of a non-sequitur in my Churchill series, but as an important and direct rebuff to anyone who remembers Churchill exclusively as a warlord. 

Booted out of office in 1945, Churchill lost the General Election to one of the most zealously innovative Labour governments in British history which gave the country a welfare state and the National Health Service. The result, quite properly, was a sting for the man who presided over the greatest victory the world had ever known, but it was the beginning and not the end of his forgotten third act as an elder statesman and global peacemaker. 

War-like qualities in peacetime

Churchill wasn't fit for the trivialities of domestic life or anything other than total control as a warlord. The qualities which made him great in war repeatedly proved disastrous in peace. As a young man, his ministerial career was often controversial and heavy-handed, coupled with a reputation for arrogance and boorishness. Precisely the same qualities were brilliantly utilised in Britain's war for survival against the evilest regime the world has ever known. 

For all his imagination, for all his bravery to challenge the brutality of Nazi Germany with all the fire that the Allies could muster, it is beyond doubt is Churchill's chief commitment was to the preservation of human life. It is easy to get bogged down in what he did or did not think about institutions such as the Council of Europe or the creation of the European Economic Community in the post-war world. 

Churchill comes across as equivocating on the details of Britain's engagement with post-war Europe. There can be no avoiding the body of quotes and speeches which are at once ambiguous or contradictory depending on what year and on what occasion you examine what he has to say. A modern examination of these are fads, topical because they are today's challenges. What is neglected, criminally so in fact, is the motivation of a man remembered for war but who lived for peace. 

A global politician

After his election loss, Churchill fashioned himself as the first global politician of the modern age. He was a natural macro-manager, good at what American President George H.W Bush once dubbed "the vision thing". Now the war was over, it was time to tackle the peace - a paradigm that remains in Europe to this day. In Zurich in 1946 Churchill made one of his most important post-war speeches:

"There is a remedy which ... would in a few years make all Europe ... free and ...happy. It is to re-create the European family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe."

Churchill concurrently believed that Russia should be negotiated with as he had in the World War II with Stalin. He understood that nuclear weapons shouldn't be kerbed, but that Britain should have them to prevent the risk of war (it was his successor Clement Attlee who ushered in a nuclear arsenal for Britain). European disunity had to be avoided at all costs, as he said in the Zurich speech:

"In these present days, we dwell strangely and precariously under the shield and protection of the atomic bomb. The atomic bomb is still only in the hands of a State and nation which we know will never use it except in the cause of right and freedom. But it may well be that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilisation but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself."

Churchill was a soldier at heart, but his experiences of conflict made him deeply conscious that political leaders have a moral duty to prevent war. When he was First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill's involvement in the disastrous plan for the Dardanelles Campaign resulted in the loss of 252,000 Allied soldiers; his own experiences in the trenches on the Western Front in the same year all formed in him an acute awareness of the tragedy of mechanised, mass warfare. He knew the world could not survive it a third time. 

It's this zeal and passion for life that affords a greater understanding of his global vision for peace in a United Europe. This is the essence of Churchill's third act of life after the war which was undertaken with the same emphasis on saving lives. Churchill's prodigiousness and energy meant he would not fall gently into old age (he was already in his seventies by the time he became prime minister a second time in 1951). His new obsession became the Cold War and the threat of nuclear weapons.

A global vision

For the next twenty years, both in and out of office, Churchill continued to try and curry favour with successive US presidents in a bid to limit the threat of nuclear weapons between the superpowers and to promote British prestige once more. He was also a pragmatist and did, and we would say today, ‘called it how it was.’  In one of his most famous orations, Churchill spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, where he condemned the Soviet Union's policies in Europe, famously declaring:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

"Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter. That I feel is an open cause of policy of very great importance."

Churchill's speech is considered one of the opening volleys announcing the beginning of the Cold War. It also happens to be one of the most honest. He praised the United States, which he declared stood as "the pinnacle of world power" and called for an even closer "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain as the "great powers of the English-speaking world" to organise and police the postwar world against the expansionistic policies of the Soviet Union.

While Joseph Stalin accused Churchill of "war-mongering", Churchill understood that when dealing with the Soviets there was nothing they admired as much as strength, and there is nothing for which they had less respect than unprincipled military weakness. Churchill understood that strength is the condition of peace, and there was no shame in ensuring it was known.

In what is considered to be his last great parliamentary speech delivered to the House of Commons in 1955, Churchill wonderfully, beautifully articulated that:  

"Unless a trustworthy and universal agreement upon disarmament, conventional and nuclear alike, can be reached and an effective system of inspection is established and is actually working, there is only one sane policy for the free world in the next few years. That is what we call defence through deterrents. This we have already adopted and proclaimed. These deterrents may at any time become the parents of disarmament, provided that they deter.

"I have said, like the United Kingdom and Western Europe, have had this outstanding vulnerability to carry. But the hydrogen bomb, with its vast range of destruction and the even wider area of contamination, would be effective also against nations whose population, hitherto, has been so widely dispersed over large land areas as to make them feel that they were not in any danger at all. 

"Which way shall we turn to save our lives and the future of the world? It does not matter so much to old people: they are going to die soon anyway; but I find it poignant to look at youth in all its activity and ardour and, most of all, to watch little children playing their merry games, and wonder what would lie before them if God wearied of mankind. 

"The day may dawn when fair play, love for one's fellow men, respect for justice and freedom, will enable tormented generations to march forth serene and triumphant from the hideous epoch in which we have to dwell. Meanwhile, never flinch, never weary, never despair."

Churchill was a bulldog in battle, but never a bloodhound. He took no relish in the loss of life. Throughout his leadership in the World War II, Churchill was reluctant to risk British lives unless absolutely necessary. He was shocked at early American calls in 1942 to invade France before the Allies were prepared and, along with the Chief of the Imperial Staff General Alan Brooke, was instrumental in pushing the plans to 1944 when casualty predictions were fewer.

Churchill knew that war was man's natural predilection and that certain conditions gave rise to it. His ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, fought in the War of the Spanish Succession and of whom the Churchill wrote a seven-tome biography. He understood national ambition, national restraint and national war and his family's place in it. Churchill always believed himself to be a man of destiny, but and the driving obsession of his final decades was to ensure Britain, and he had a hand in it. 

It's what drove Churchill to continue as prime minister and as an international statesman working for a global resolution against the spectre of an atomic holocaust. It's also what motivated him to fight on against his declining health despite the long-pleading of his wife Clementine to retire (particularly after a series of debilitating strokes throughout the 1950s). Fight on he did, right until he retired from the House of Commons in 1964. He died in January 1965.

Peace, not war, is the overriding motivation that one must appreciate when remembering Sir Winston Churchill, particularly on his birthday. 

Explore the Churchill series to date on our hub page.

Image: Crimean Conference--Sir Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Marshal Joseph Stalin at the palace in Yalta, where the Big Three met (February 1945). Copyright Library of Congress, reproduction number:  LC-USZ62-7449