Winston Churchill Good man or not?

[Luther Moore]

My Mother was telling me the other day how much her Granmother hated Winston Churchill. She said that my Great Grandmother used to despise Churchill because he used to send the Australians and New Zealanders to be slaughtered before the English.

Is this true?

[Bruce]

An interesting question... and one not dissimilar to asking whether John Key is a good man or not!
As far as history goes - it appear Winston was the right man for England at the time - but he was beaten soundly in the 1945 election.
review his Wikipedia brief (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill) it is quite aparent that during his political career he made some horrendous decisions - the Gallipoli campaign being one of the most notable, and as a result I can understand Aussies and Kiwis disliking him. He was by all accounts a very complex character, suffering from a stammer and mental illness (his "black dogs") with a large number of prejudices and a distinctly upper class upbringing. He was a great leader and a great politician, but as a politician he had to be able to play that game, with its various manoeuverings and power games. in short, yes he was a flawed leader, but the best at the time and one to whom the free world should always be grateful.

[obiwan27]

Nobody is perfect even the great leaders of the time. Churchill made his mistakes, including i believe being one of the architects of the Gallipoli campaign. He was the right person to lead Britain in WW2 but was a wartime leader and had failed to prepare for the peacetime and was defeated in the election as noted by Bruce above.

Churchill's fame is very much earned through his leadership during WW2 and people remember him mostly for this. I guess the simple answer is that nobody is perfect. I'm not sure whether your grandmother and great-grandmother's perspective is justified or not, that's how they felt about that person but I'd imagine there'd be some link to Gallipoli there somewhere and perhaps some family loss I'm guessing?

[kiwitone]

great explanation Bruce.....I too have wondered wether he was all good...flawed is spot on.

[Bruce]

Winston Churchill will always be one of my heroes and role models precisely because he had his issues but overcame them to become one of the greatest figures of history.

[Luther Moore]

Interesting to hear what you think.

I think it was mainly because of the Gallipoli Campaign judged on how she said they were sent to be slaughtered.

It could of also been a bit of anger and mixed feelings due to her Husband dying from WWI and Baor war injury's a couple of years before her Son was killed in the war.

No doubt he was a great leader at the time but it was interesting to hear what someone of the time thought of him.

[Dave Homewood]

Churchill was not just a brilliant wartime leader but was a very astute politician in the inter-war years, being one of the very few who was actually aware of what Hitler was up to and rattling as many cages as he could to get the passive Government under Baldwin to pull finger and rearm Britain.

He was also a very good military historian and largely learned from past campaigns (wheras many leaders never did learn from others mistakes).

Gallipoli was a dreadful miscalculation and loss but Churchill was not solely responsible. At the time of the collapse of Europe in 1940 he was the only politician who steadied his people and stood up to Hitler with utter defiance.

I have a lot of respect for him. He was far better than anyone we have today in the world in leading people through a crisis. He had to overcome a speech defect, like the king, which made his voice distinctive and he stood out as both an orator and a wordsmith.

If you haven't seen the film The Gathering Storm (HBO), do so. It's a masterpiece. I don't know what the sequel is like but I am not sure I want to watch it as the masterful Albert Finney is not in the second one.

[flyjoe180]

Churchill was one of, if not the, greatest statesmen of the 20th century. Yes he made some bad strategic calls as Lord of the Admiralty, but he was by all accounts a good soldier, and after the Gallipoli debacle he spent time on the Western Front as an officer with the Grenadier Guards and later the as a Lieutenant-Colonel with the Royal Scots Fusiliers from 1916. He was trying, at the risk of being killed, to reinstate his reputation after his dismissal from the war cabinet.

So far as Gallipoli is concerned, the inquest into the campaign pretty much left Sir Ian Hamilton as the main scapegoat, a sad finding which has only recently been questioned and in some cases overturned. Churchill escaped largely unscathed, probably due to his active service on the Western Front, and Lord Kitchener was drowned when the ship he was on was torpedoed.

Churchill, as mentioned above, was the right man in the right place at the right time to oppose Adolf Hitler and to motivate and encourage his people. He was able to cling to power when a number of cabinet members wanted to make peace with Nazi Germany.

His loss of Prime Minister-ship in 1945 was probably driven by the need for reform, and a desire to rebuild and move on after six years of total war. In 1951 he again became Prime Minister of Great Britain.

[nuuumannn]

Far be it for me to attempt to exhonerate Churchill's name, but to be honest, Churchill didn't send anyone to Gallipoli; he was First Lord of the Admiralty at that time (1915); Prime Minister was Herbert Asquith and Secretary of State for War was Kitchener, whom Churchill did not get on with after witnessing his brutality in the Sudan. Kitchener approved the idea.

The idea of storming Constantinople with major units of the Royal Navy supported by land invasion was quite an advanced one and full of potential, which was Churchill's. In practise however, using big battleships to destry the hill forts in the Dardanelles was not a good one, but the key issue behind the whole venture's failure was timing, in both the naval bombardment and the landings; both were poorly timed and executed, resulting in the deaths we commemmorate. Churchill also blamed Hamilton because of his unsuitability for the job and his lack of haste.

The entire episode was bitterly opposed in parliament, not necessarily because of the high losses of personnel that might have been suffered (remember, far greater losses were being suffered on the Western Front at that time - there was also the concern of the drain on resources), but for the sheer audacity of the idea - Churchill's number Two in the Admiralty, First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher was also in opposition to the scheme and resigned as a result of it, but his proposal was even bolder - a land invasion of the Pomeranian coast and push to Berlin supported by over 100 naval vessels.

Churchill suffered from depression; he was also dyslexic, which makes his writing all the more remarkable. He bacame First Lord again on the outbreak of war in September 1939.

Just one thing; the ship Kitchener was aboard, the cruiser Hampshire hit a mine off the coast of Orkney.

[flyjoe180]

Ah yes, a mine it was too, thanks for the correction there nuuumannn. I was going from memory which as we all know is prone to mistakes.

[nuuumannn]

Hi Flyjoe, the whole Churchill culpability over Gallipoli is and always will be controversial; in reality he had no control over army matters, despite coming up with the idea.

Regarding Hamilton, Churchill was very much under the belief that he was not suitable for leading the land invasion, and he was right. He and Hamilton were close friends and had been for years; he was a soldier of the old order, of the world of cavalry charges on horse back. Churchill believed he did not have the insight to lead an invasion of the sort against the Gallipoli Peninsula. His stalling on the beach led the Turks to reinforce their vulnerable position once they cottoned on to what the British were up to.

The naval advance into the Dardanelles also did not go according to plan. The lack of haste meant that by the time the force of ships reached the hill forts that line the Narrows, the Turks had manned their guns, which to begin with were not. This delay also gave the Germans time to position mine laying U-boats in the Narrows. Churchill initially proposed a speedy entrance into the Dardanelles, through the Narrows and to the mouth of the Bosphorous on to Constantinople, although many of the old battleships would not have been able to keep up with the dreadnought Queen Elisabeth.

It is also worth examining why Churchill came up with the idea of attacking Turkey in the first place. He was a compassionate man and saw the Western Front as an utter waste and was desperate to come up with an alternative. His motive was to break the dead lock on the Western Front by forcing the Turks to request German assistance, thereby reducing the number of Germans in France and Belgium. Probably wouldn’t have happened like that, but it was worth a shot in Churchill’s mind; anything was better than the needless slaughter.

[John L]

On Gallipoli - perhaps if the ANZACS had been landed where they were meant to, it might have gone quite differently. We'll never know - I say blame the Navy, not Churchill.

[Dave Homewood]

They should have used parachute troops. What was Churchill thinking by not using parachute troops...

My grandfather who was bornin about 1907 was named Ian Hamilton Alexander Fitness. The Ian hamilton and the Alexander were named for the 'great' generals, and his parents apparently were very proud of that till after Gallipoli. From then on they apparently wished he'd been named something else, so Nana told me. Could be worse, he could have been named after Douglas Haig. Now there was a first class idiot.

[ngatimozart]

As a kid I remember Churchills death in 1965 (I think). It was on the tv news and they gave him what looked like a stte funeral. He had his flaws but in 1940 when the poms needed a leader he stood up and di the job. I have always loved his eloquence, his speeches and turns of phrase. He aws an absolute word smith and probably the most consumate speaker of the 20th Century. In my mind the too most eloquent speakers I heard in the 20th century were Churchill and David Lange, but Churchill would definitely be on a level of his own. One a jpurnalist the other a lawyer.