Churchill at War (2024) s01e04 Episode Script

You are flesh
Are you on the beach yet? Over.
Winston?
Winston?
Won't you go to bed?
Winston?
Do you realize that by the time you wake
20,000 of our young men
have lost their lives?
We'll never surrender.
The mounting of Operation Overlord was
the greatest event and duty in the world.
The fearful price we had to pay
in human life and blood
for the great offensives
of the First World War
was graven in my mind.
Churchill was
always haunted by Gallipoli.
The whole thing was a fiasco.
As Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings,
drew nearer and nearer,
he'd began to fear
that there would be a bloodbath
and he'd committed himself to something
that was going to be a disaster.
If Overlord was to be done,
it must be done with smashing force.
No matter how the storm
rages against the walls of our fortress,
this battle will, in the end,
despite all the devilry of our opponents,
lead to the greatest victory
of the German Reich.
Germany still
dominates the continent of Europe.
Britain, America and their allies
have to get a foothold
on that European shore
and start liberating Western Europe.
All southern England
became a vast military camp,
filled with men trained,
instructed, and eager
to come to grips
with the Germans across the water.
Churchill always wanted to
return to the continent in force one day,
but he didn't want
to undertake it too early,
and he only wanted to undertake it
when he was absolutely,
100% certain of success.
You couldn't do this at half-cock
because otherwise the Germans might win.
The question is, is the cause
that important where life can be lost?
And I think Winston Churchill
came to the conclusion it was.
The enemy were bound to know
that a great invasion was being prepared.
We had to conceal
the place and time of the attack
and make him think we were landing
somewhere else and at a different moment.
There's only so many places
you can go. Calais is a logical choice.
Being the closest place to England,
certainly that's where the Germans think
the Allies are going to land,
but ultimately Normandy is chosen.
It's a better chance for us to get ashore
because the defenses
at Calais are immense.
In wartime,
truth is so precious,
that she should always be attended
by a bodyguard of lies.
They'll come up with a deception plan
called Operation Bodyguard.
We want to confuse them
as to where we are going
so they don't build up any defenses.
Churchill had such an active mind.
He thoroughly enjoyed
the intrigue in these different schemes.
There are British double agents
telling the Germans all sorts of nonsense
and spinning them all sorts of lines about
where and when the invasion's gonna be.
They make the best US general, Patton,
sit down in southeast England
with an entirely fake army group.
It's nothing but inflatable tanks
and aircraft made of balsa wood.
Simulated concentrations
of troops, fleets of dummy ships,
increased wireless activity were all used.
General Eisenhower will get
command of the invasion of Normandy.
He had been in command
of the landing in North Africa.
He's also the senior commander
for the invasion of Sicily,
so he's got two landings under his belt.
From Eisenhower's perspective,
they needed Britain as the springboard
for the liberation of the continent,
so Churchill had to get on
with Eisenhower,
Eisenhower had to get on with Churchill.
You've got the political
and the military interacting here.
There are tensions there for sure.
Churchill fashioned himself
as a military leader,
but he's not driving this.
At this point in time, his contribution,
in a way, has been made.
Eisenhower's trying to,
in a sense, manage Churchill.
And that's something
nobody has an ability to do.
Keeping a personality like Churchill
under thumb isn't easy.
"The decision's made, Prime Minister,
now let us get on with the planning."
I felt we were
at one of the climaxes of the war.
As D-Day approached, the tension grew.
Eisenhower would use
threatening to quit
to make sure
that President Roosevelt stayed with Ike
and not jump on
one of Churchill's war plans.
Roosevelt will defer to Eisenhower,
and ultimately Winston Churchill
has to defer to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
By that point, the Americans
very much are firmly in the driving seat.
Britain was no longer the senior
strategic partner in the Second World War,
and America began
increasingly to call the shots.
At the beginning of the war,
you could probably say
that Roosevelt looked up to Churchill
in some ways.
Here was this guy
who was standing up to Hitler
and had become this famous person.
But the huge might
of the American military
meant that Churchill starts
to become the junior partner.
When they were planning D-Day
in great secrecy,
Churchill said that he wanted to be there.
A man who has
to play an effective part
in taking grave
and terrible decisions of war
may need the refreshment of adventure.
He may need also the comfort
that when sending
so many others to their deaths,
he may share, in a small way, their risks.
This thing of always
wanting to be where the action was
stayed with him throughout his life.
You know, It goes back to his early life.
He loved the battle.
I hate to say it,
but he liked a battlefield.
His adrenaline rush
from his antics in South Africa
probably never left him.
I should be there.
I should be on board that ship
this very instant as the barrage begins.
The greatest invasion in the history
of the world, and I'm trapped here.
This is all the King's fault.
Well, I'm afraid I agree with the King.
The country can ill afford your losing
your head to a stray shell in battle.
- You lose your head enough as it is.
- But he shouldn't interfere.
It wasn't just him.
Eisenhower was against your going too.
But the King put the pin in it, didn't he?
I have the right to go if I so choose.
But he knew I haven't the heart
to refuse a royal request.
Well, if it means anything to you,
I'm glad you're not
on a cruiser being bombed.
Suppose it all goes wrong.
What if we've miscalculated?
What if we never get ashore?
What if we flounder on the beaches
for months like Gallipoli?
- I need to be there.
- Really, Winston, to do what?
You'll be a spectator.
You're needed here with the people.
Those are their sons
and husbands and fathers out there.
Who will speak to them if not you?
You've got an answer
for everything.
I don't suppose you'll be commandeering
a ship to France wearing that.
I could if I wanted to.
Thank you.
I'm off to the Map Room.
At least they should know something.
You could imagine,
you know, General Eisenhower,
"The last thing we want is
the Prime Minister of England
at threat watching this whole thing."
There's this incredible correspondence
between him and King George VI,
as the King finally has to pull rank,
and Churchill basically
has to knuckle under.
June 6th, 1944, was the most
important day of the 20th century.
Democracy was just hanging by a thread.
A fine lad from Catskill bakers
Churchill's got his own
personal history with these operations.
If it goes wrong, there's not gonna be
a second attempt for a long time.
Anything could happen.
He's worried about, he calls it the flower
of British and American youth drowning,
dying in the shallows of the French coast,
the tide awash
with the blood of that youth.
The battle that has now begun
will grow constantly in scale
and in intensity for many weeks to come,
and I shall not attempt
to speculate upon its course.
There was intense excitement
about the landings in France,
which everyone knew
were in progress at the moment.
There are gigantic airstrikes.
There's a huge concentration
of naval firepower.
Troops have been trained.
Everything has been done to give D-Day
the biggest chance of success.
Because of deception operations,
the Germans don't know where and
when it's coming, and they're confused.
The Allies were able
to establish that beachhead
before the Nazis fully reacted.
They'd assumed that there would be
pretty significant losses on the beaches.
In fact, despite very fierce fighting,
particularly on Omaha Beach,
one of the American beaches,
the landings go pretty well.
The Allies will build up forces
there, and ultimately they will break out.
D-Day is an astonishing success.
We now take D-Day
and the success of D-Day for granted.
And a setback in Normandy in 1944
could have considerably prolonged the war
and might well have spelled the end
for both Churchill
and Roosevelt's administrations.
Shortly after
the invasion of Normandy,
Winston Churchill will go to see himself.
Churchill wants to be near
the action, of course, as he always does.
He just couldn't stay away from this.
He goes to congratulate
all the folks that conducted the landing,
including General Montgomery,
the principal British commander.
Montgomery is not a man without ego,
and I don't think Churchill spent
enormous amounts of time
worrying about the egos
of those below him.
So here's a great story
where Churchill offers Montgomery a drink,
and Montgomery's a teetotaler and he says,
"I don't drink and I don't smoke.
I'm 100% fit."
Winston Churchill,
not to be outdone, says,
"I both drink and smoke. I'm 200% fit."
And so we have this little exchange
of the combative and competitive nature
of Winston Churchill.
Paris is free.
The people of Paris rose
to meet their liberators.
Quite rapidly, far more Americans
are fighting in Western Europe than Brits.
As a result, Churchill feels himself
being pushed off the top table a bit.
The only times
I ever quarrel with the Americans
are when they fail to give us
a fair share of opportunity to win glory.
It has always been my wish to keep equal,
but how can you do that
against so mighty a nation
and a population
nearly three times your own?
The "who's in charge" part
really belongs to the strongest entity.
And Dwight Eisenhower was the general
in charge of eventually
liberating Europe from Hitler.
Probably because, you know,
we were the biggest dog in the pound.
As the Allies started
to liberate the continent in 1944,
Winston Churchill found out
about Auschwitz.
It was via the Foreign Office
and some Polish escapees
who brought the news to the West.
Prime Minister to Foreign Secretary.
There is no doubt
that this is probably the greatest
and most horrible crime ever committed
in the whole history of the world.
And it has been done
by scientific machinery.
Declarations should be made in public
so that everyone connected with it
will be hunted down and put to death.
Many people have criticized Churchill
for not doing more
when it became pretty clear
that these concentration camps
were not just places of degradation,
places of humiliation, and slave labor,
but were places of execution,
of industrial murder.
And word was getting out
through the early 1940s.
The trouble was what to do about it.
Many people have submitted that,
"Well, you should bomb concentration camps
to try and free them."
And Churchill tells
Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary,
quote, "Get anything out of the Air Force
you can, and invoke me if necessary."
So this was high on his mind.
But there was a question around
accuracy. Can you bomb gas chambers?
Would they just end up
bombing the barracks blocks
and killing the Jewish inmates anyway?
The way to end this Holocaust
was to just bring the war to an end
as soon as possible.
That was the argument.
It's one of those difficult
moral decisions they make during the war,
and certainly one
that can be questioned even now.
We talk a lot about D-Day in 1944.
What people don't remember is
the Soviet Union launched,
by some measures, the largest attack
in the history of warfare
on the Eastern Front at the same time.
In the space of one month,
they inflict half a million casualties
on the German army.
So that's coming in from the east
as the Allies are landing from the west.
The Soviet Union
is making massive progress in the east.
Eastern Europe, Poland, the Balkans,
might all fall under Soviet control.
So who gets to Berlin, how much territory
they take along the way,
will shape the post-war world.
I deem it highly important
we should shake hands with the Russians
as far to the east as possible.
I cannot think of any moment
when the burden of the war
has laid more heavily upon me.
Churchill never wanted to be
the prime minister who oversaw
the dismantling of the British Empire,
but he had essentially
had to mortgage the empire to survive
when Britain was fighting alone
against the Nazis,
waiting for the rest of the world to come.
Britain is becoming secondary.
What was once
the most powerful empire in the world
is becoming an island to some extent.
Is this going to be a new world
where it's Soviet Union
versus the United States,
and we are just bit players?
It's a really hard thing
for this Victorian imperialist
to come to terms with.
The relationship
between Churchill and Roosevelt
started to fray in the fall of 1944.
Churchill feels decisions are now
being made between the two superpowers,
Stalin and Roosevelt.
Churchill's like,
"Hey, don't forget about me."
And so the rest of the war becomes
a constant effort on his part
to try and push Britain's point of view
and his own point of view
about what the post-war world
should look like.
In fall of '44, Churchill goes
to Moscow for his own meeting with Stalin.
This idea of spheres of influence
is something that has settled
on Churchill's mind.
Where is a clearly defined
British sphere of influence,
and where is
the Soviet sphere of influence?
I am the leader
of a strong, unbeaten nation.
Yet every morning when I wake,
my first thought is
how I can please President Roosevelt,
and my second thought is
how I can conciliate Marshal Stalin.
Churchill carries out this
without Roosevelt
or any American representation
officially in this negotiation.
He believed that history was made
by great men,
and in his view they'd largely be
men sitting down around a table
and drawing up lines.
I think these percentages
are fair and reasonable.
Do you agree?
This is satisfactory.
Thank you, Joseph.
Churchill calls this scribble with
the percentages "the naughty document."
You know, "Britain is going to
control this, and you could control that."
It was a way for Churchill to show
that he wasn't going to become
a weak post-war player
that was subservient to the United States
or gave up aspirations
of keeping the British Empire strong.
Perhaps we should burn this.
We are, after all, deciding
the fates of millions of people.
No. You keep it.
I think it's called "the naughty document"
because Churchill knew that
he shouldn't really be doing this.
It seemed immensely cynical,
and places like Romania and Bulgaria
would get 80% Russian domination.
Greece he felt that he'd saved.
"This brand I plucked from the burning,"
he says, about Greece.
He sees as if
he pulls that log from the fire.
But there was a lot of stuff that clearly,
the Balkans, other parts of Eastern
Europe, he ultimately had to accept.
He's recognizing
that the best he can do
is secure British interests
to the greatest extent he can.
I have had
very nice talks with the Old Bear.
I like him the more I see him.
I'm sure they wish to work with us.
I have to keep the President
in constant touch,
and this is the delicate side.
The Germans
are now on retreat in the west.
The Red Army is bearing down
from the east.
There's a sense
that maybe the end is in sight.
By the end of 1944, the three allies
realize that they really have to discuss,
together in person, the end of the war.
Stalin absolutely refuses
to leave his own borders.
He is terrified of flying,
terrified of leaving his security behind,
and so he will only meet
within the borders of the Soviet Union.
Churchill and Roosevelt agree,
they will go to the Soviet Union
to meet with him.
The Soviet Union is pretty devastated
after considerable fighting
on the Eastern Front,
and so one of the very few locations that
they can find is Yalta on the Black Sea.
It's very much an emblem
of the Soviet Union itself,
where on the surface everything
looks fine, but if you look too closely,
you can see it's quite different
from what you see on the outside,
and it really is a disaster.
The palace has been overrun by bedbugs.
Bedbugs have gotten into
Winston Churchill's bed,
and they bite his feet during the night,
and Churchill says that if they had spent
ten years looking for a place,
they couldn't have found
a worse one than Yalta,
and he even later refers to it
as "the Riviera of Hades."
We are now entering
a world of imponderables,
and at every stage,
occasions for self-questioning arise.
Shadows are lengthening at Yalta.
Churchill later talked about believing
that Roosevelt was fading.
FDR has managed to win
a fourth unprecedented term
in the 1944 elections, but he is unwell.
He's in congestive heart failure
at this point.
Churchill wrote at one point,
that "our friendship is the rock upon
which I build the hopes of the world."
I think that there was
a sense of finality to it,
a sense that this long drama
was coming to an end.
Roosevelt wants to, understandably,
save as many American lives as possible
by bringing the Soviet Union
into the fight against Japan.
He doesn't yet know
if the atomic bomb will be an option.
They are still working on that
and have yet to test it.
Also incredibly important to Roosevelt
is the creation of the United Nations.
FDR so wants this to work that,
maybe, he deluded himself into thinking
that Stalin would keep his promises,
because he wanted it so badly.
Churchill believed that
he alone had the necessary genius
to kind of thrash out the post-war world.
He thought FDR was worryingly naive
and worryingly liberal.
He knew that FDR did not like
the British Empire,
so Churchill could not risk having FDR
be the architect of the post-war world.
Churchill wants Roosevelt
to be tougher with Stalin,
but he can't he can't swing it.
The Soviet Union
decides that they will join the UN.
The Soviet Union decides
that they will go to war with Japan
after the war in Europe ends.
And they come away
with a promise from Stalin
for the freedom
and independence of Poland.
The fact was, though,
that Stalin was lying through his teeth.
Britain had gone to war in 1939
to protect Poland from foreign occupation.
That was why
Britain was in this terrible war.
So you come out at the end of the war,
and Stalin's basically occupied Poland?
That's a nightmare for Churchill.
The misery
of the whole world appalls me,
and I fear increasingly
that new struggles may arise
out of those we are successively ending.
Winston Churchill wrote FDR
over a thousand letters and telegrams,
and, ultimately, Franklin Roosevelt wrote,
maybe, almost 800.
Churchill is definitely
the suitor in the relationship.
Mr. President, peace
with Germany and Japan on our terms
will not bring much rest to you and me.
There will be a torn, ragged,
and hungry world to help to its feet.
And what will Uncle Joe
or his successor say
to the way we should both like to do it?
There's a pulling apart, a cooling.
They're more like an old married couple
that know each other's foibles,
but can't imagine life without each other.
To the whole free world,
the stunning news has come
that Franklin Roosevelt is dead.
When I received these tidings
early in the morning of Friday the 13th,
I felt as if
I'd been struck a physical blow.
When the news came that FDR had died,
Churchill gave a remarkable eulogy
in the House of Commons,
understanding that the friendship
had been imperfect,
that it had been personal
as well as political.
My relations
with this shining personality
had played so large a part in the long,
terrible years we had worked together.
Now they had come to an end,
and I was overpowered
by a sense of deep and irreparable loss.
Churchill once said that,
"To me, Franklin Roosevelt was like
opening a bottle of champagne."
And Roosevelt wrote to Churchill,
"It's fun to be
in the same decade with you."
And I think we were lucky that they were
where they were when the crisis came.
Hitler had made
his final and supreme decision
to stay in Berlin to the end.
The capital was soon
completely encircled by the Russians,
and the Führer had lost
all power to control events.
It remained for him to organize
his own death amid the ruins of the city.
He shot himself through the mouth.
I must say, I think he was
perfectly right to die like that.
I have no special statement to make
about the war position in Europe,
except that it is
definitely more satisfactory
than it was this time five years ago.
Yesterday morning at 2:41 a.m.,
the representative
of the German High Command
signed the act of unconditional surrender.
The German war is therefore at an end.
Long live the cause of freedom.
God save the King.
In the hour of overwhelming victory,
I was only too well aware
of the difficulties
and perils that lay ahead.
But here at least,
there could be
a brief moment for rejoicing.
On the night of VE Day,
he was on his own
in No. 10 Downing Street,
because Clementine was in Russia
doing a sort of state visit.
And he had dinner,
and then he went into the garden
and walked with Smoky, the cat.
I think it's extraordinary
that he was on his own that night
when all his work came to fruition.
If the Russians are ever
convinced we are afraid of them
and can be bullied into submission,
then indeed I should despair
of our future relations with them.
It's clear that the understanding
of the UK and the US of the post-war order
is going to be different.
The Americans,
they still haven't won against Japan.
They've got huge objectives there.
They don't share Churchill's horror
of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.
Churchill was so fearful
that Stalin might not stop
at the demarcation lines
that had been agreed with the Russians
and might actually just push on,
because there were so many troops
in the Red Army.
He's appalled at Stalin.
He sees a dystopian post-war world
where perhaps he thinks
the war could go on,
and there could be war
between the Western Allies
and the Soviet Union.
I want a plan in place
to enforce the Yalta Agreement,
to give Poland
a fair chance at self-government.
We can't take on the Russians alone.
They outnumber us.
Before America leaves,
we must take the initiative.
You mean, attack the Soviets?
- Well, that's unthinkable.
- Except that I have thought it.
I want a plan for all contingencies.
Before it is too late.
Churchill is offered this crazy plan
called Operation Unthinkable,
where the Wehrmacht, the German army,
could be reissued with their weapons,
having been defeated,
and turned round
to attack the Soviet armies.
A completely bonkers plan,
which is not proceeded with.
But that shows where he was,
mentally, emotionally.
We have yet to make sure
that the honorable purposes
for which we entered the war
are not brushed aside,
and that the words
"freedom," "democracy," and "liberation"
are not distorted from their true meaning.
There would be little use in punishing
the Hitlerites for their crimes
if totalitarian or police governments were
to take the place of the German invaders.
As the war wound down,
Churchill was full of thoughts and ideas
about what the post-war world
is going to look like.
But he has to fight a general election.
Churchill's coalition partners,
the Labour Party, say,
"We're no longer prepared to be
in a coalition government with you."
"You know what? We want power."
"The war's won, well done to you,
you've played a pivotal part,
but we've got a vision for the future,
and you're not part of it."
If you thought
that you had had enough of me
and that I ought to be put out to grass,
I tell you,
I would take it with the best of grace.
But I must warn you,
you must be prepared
for further sacrifices to great causes.
Why aren't you painting?
Surely you deserve some relaxation.
Oh, I am relaxing.
Only when I do,
these thoughts keep interrupting.
You've won the war.
Yes.
But now that it's all over in Europe,
it is my duty to call a general election,
one that I might not win.
You saw how the people adore you.
Shouldn't you simply ride
on the coattails of victory?
Yes, I should.
Well, in that case paint.
The election of 1945
is an election that's been put off
with the necessities of war,
and it'll take some time
to conduct this election
with so many servicemen
scattered around the globe.
It is no time to mince about,
to mince measures
and fool around with weak governments.
The Labour Party had
one of the best slogans of all time.
They said simply,
"Cheer Churchill, vote Labour."
Celebrate Churchill,
celebrate the victory,
the deliverance,
the salvation of this country,
but we're the ones
who are going to take it forward.
He could have
stayed above the political fray.
He could have presented himself
as a candidate of national unity
who led a coalition government.
Instead, he launches into a full-blown,
vitriolic campaign
against the Labour Party.
Foreign policy
He says some stupid things.
He's electioneering.
He says the Labour Party will bring in
a kind of Gestapo, a secret police.
Suddenly we're back in the gutter, right?
We're back in partisan politics,
and the British public
don't like what they see.
After polling day,
Mr. Churchill went away
to paint in the south of France.
He had fought a strenuous campaign,
and he took a well-deserved holiday
before meeting President Truman
and Marshal Stalin at the conference.
While the ballots are still coming
in from all the corners of the globe,
Churchill goes to Potsdam for the final
conference of the Second World War.
That Potsdam conference is due
to open formally on the 17th of July.
On the 16th of July,
out in the wilds of New Mexico,
the world enters the nuclear age
when the United States
successfully tests a plutonium device,
which turns out to have superlative power
and destructive potential.
President Truman is at Potsdam,
awaiting the start of the conference.
Now, that news is relayed
to President Truman,
who's only been in the job a few months.
Churchill said to Truman,
"Let me know if it's a flop or a plop."
And Truman just sends
a message back, "Plop."
Churchill recognized that this
was going to be a war-changing moment.
The war in the Pacific continues,
and now everybody starts to recognize
the invasion of mainland Japan
will be incredibly costly.
Even Churchill believes it will be
a million and a half casualties,
a million United States,
and half a million from the Commonwealth.
The Manhattan Project
has come to fruition.
There are all kinds of moral choices
now having to be made,
and now we have an atomic bomb.
Part of the nuclear deal is that
before any nuclear weapon is deployed,
Churchill will have to
give permission as well.
Churchill later says his agreement was
unanimous, unqualified, and automatic.
He absolutely believed that nuclear weapon
should be used to shorten the war
and prevent a terribly costly invasion
of the Japanese homeland.
And I think it's important
for Churchill, for lots of reasons,
to actually plant that flag.
This is a bomb fueled by the very energy
that makes the stars
of the night sky pulse.
He wants to be part of this.
This can't be an American thing,
and that's why he's happy to consent.
Churchill has to leave Potsdam
halfway through
as the final tally is now ready,
and so he flies home
to receive the results of the election.
I awoke suddenly
with a sharp stab of almost physical pain.
A hitherto subconscious conviction
that we were beaten
broke forth and dominated my mind.
All the pressure of great events
on and against which
I'd mentally so long maintained
my flying speed would cease,
and I should fall.
Conservatives, 180.
Labour, 364.
In the end, it's the people
who decide who governs them.
And he really proved that.
You know, look at the guy.
He manages to steer his country
to victory, to salvation,
in the Second World War.
And then, boom, 1945, he gets
the order of the boot, first class.
It must have been
such a sort of slap around the face
when the results came through.
My mother was in floods of tears,
and the only one who wasn't in tears,
for once, was Churchill,
who said, you know,
"The people have spoken."
The Labour Party's great victory
shows that the country is ready
for a new policy
to face new world conditions.
After five and a half years
of war and hardship,
people wanted a national health service,
they wanted rebuilding, reconstruction.
But, of course, he didn't lose
his way with words, even in defeat.
Clementine said to him,
"Maybe it's a blessing in disguise."
And he said,
"Well, it's very well disguised."
The British public's perception
of him was very different during wartime,
when that kind of statesmanlike
grandeur, single-mindedness
was useful in mobilizing people
and inspiring people
at a time of great challenge and darkness,
versus peacetime.
If he had been as popular as he is now
in the national imagination,
it's hard to imagine that any party he led
could have lost an election,
because we have iconicized him
in such an extreme way
and made him this singular hero.
The power to shape the future
would be denied me.
The knowledge and experience
I had gathered,
the authority and goodwill
I had gained in so many countries,
would vanish.
He loses power.
But just before Churchill returns
to London to hear the result,
the Potsdam Proclamation is issued.
It calls on Japan to surrender
unconditionally, and if Japan doesn't
What was gunpowder? Trivial.
What was electricity? Meaningless.
This atomic bomb
is the Second Coming in wrath.
The bomb brought peace,
but men alone can keep that peace.
And henceforward,
they will keep it under penalties
which threaten the survival
not only of civilization,
but of humanity itself.
Out of a life
of long and varied experience,
the most valuable
piece of advice I could hand on to you
is to know how to command
the moment to remain.
Someone like Winston Churchill can't go
from being at the center of everything
to quietly painting and
That was a part of his life.
He didn't want it to be his entire life,
and so he was never going to just retire.
Churchill can never sit still.
He's always one who's been
in a hurry to get to somewhere else.
He receives an invitation to speak
at Westminster College
in Fulton, Missouri,
and it's in the home state
of the American president, Harry Truman.
The train to Jefferson City
will be ready to board soon, sir.
Time enough to thrash these gentlemen
of the press the way they deserve.
I'll take three.
One for me.
You know, lads,
if I were to be born again,
there is one country
in which I would want to be a citizen,
in which a man knows
he has an unbounded future.
And where's that, Mr. Churchill?
The USA.
Although I deplore some of your customs.
And which ones would those be?
Well, for one thing,
you stop drinking with your meals.
I call.
Flush. Clubs.
What'll your speech be about, sir?
I hadn't realized
this was a working card game.
I shall speak about the deplorable sphere
of influence of the Soviet Union.
How it has hardened
into an impenetrable barrier,
trapping millions in oppression.
The Russians were just our allies.
They'll call you a warmonger.
It won't be for the first time.
But you see, gentlemen,
I've played this hand before.
I was right in 1938
and I'm right now.
From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended
across the continent.
He was always anti-communist.
He tries to remind his audience
of all the things that he thinks unite us,
freedom, democracy,
free speech, and so on,
that are now under threat
in this Soviet-dominated sphere.
What we have to consider here today,
while time remains,
is the establishment of conditions
of freedom and democracy
as rapidly as possible in all countries.
Churchill gave
the great Iron Curtain speech,
which basically said, "Good versus evil."
And that moral clarity,
you know, upsets people.
And, of course, he was attacked again
for being a warmonger,
just as he had been in the 1930s.
Our difficulties and dangers
will not be removed
by closing our eyes to them.
This speech predicts
what is going to happen,
which is that an Iron Curtain
is going to descend across Europe,
and you have the advent of the Cold War.
Having been proved wrong about
so many things in his earlier career,
he's proved right twice
about the tyranny of Nazism
and then about Soviet communism too.
Many people say
I ought to have retired after the war
and have become
some sort of elder statesman.
But how could I?
I have fought all my life
and cannot give up fighting now.
That compulsion
to lead on the international stage
was still there.
You know,
he really doesn't want to let go.
Mr. Churchill, scene two, take one.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the vote you will give on February 23rd
is of profound importance to your future.
- Cut.
- Now, wasn't that better?
We are the chosen few.
I can't remember it.
I've got one of the best memories
you can have.
I know, sir,
but that's quite all right.
Don't worry. Look at the camera
and start again, sir.
We are the chosen few.
All of you will be damned.
There is no place in heaven for you.
We can't have Heaven crammed.
I thought you were muting
quotations I read this morning.
You've got to do what you can with that.
One of the problems with democracy
is people get tired of you.
And here's a guy that led England
through a brutal period of time
and then gets booted out of office,
and then comes back
to be the Prime Minister.
It's a remarkable comeback story.
The election after six years
of Labour rule goes Conservative.
Winston Spencer Churchill,
world statesman, is returned to power.
In the British
House of Commons members' lobby,
there's an immense
bronze statue of Churchill,
and it is the habit
of many members of Parliament
to touch his shoe for luck.
All of us are reminded about
his presence on a daily basis.
He always had this view
that the way to get history
was to write it yourself.
So he set about that.
FDR is dead.
It's not like
Stalin is writing in his journals.
And of course, Hitler is dead.
Churchill immediately seizes the narrative
and is the one who is shaping
how we see World War II,
which is a position of enormous power.
And by wielding that power,
generations of historians,
and then subsequently, the public,
look at World War II and everything
that happened around it through his lens.
The Second World War brings
the Empire to an end in its incarnation.
People are demanding their freedom,
they're demanding nationalism.
Churchill genuinely believes
that Britain and America
will decide where the world goes.
What America is actually doing
is setting a different form of empire,
which is about economic control
rather than political control.
And that clashes heavily with Churchill.
Because of his imperialism,
he never really comes to terms
with the fact that the Empire is over.
Churchill is an absolutely key figure
in understanding that narrative
of Britishness that has been constructed,
I would say, to make generations of
British people feel good about themselves.
Not as a person
with all his complexity and flaws,
but as a symbol of victory,
of reinforcing the status quo,
continuity, tradition, the class systems.
The world, at times,
is starved for strong leaders,
and Churchill was a strong leader
who never forgot the beauty of freedom
and the importance of democracy.
To paraphrase Walt Whitman,
"Like America,
Churchill contains multitudes."
I think it's possible to be a leader who
accomplishes something extraordinary,
who legitimately helps save the world
from something truly evil,
and also have made decisions
that were horrific
and hold views that we find abhorrent.
We can hold all of these things.
They can all be true.
And it doesn't mean
that we have to tear down his statue,
maybe it means we put up some more
to more fully tell the story.
The doggedness, the determination,
the eloquence, the wit,
the drive, the purpose.
In that sense,
the British people see in his image
the self-image of the best of them.
Physically brave,
morally brave,
full of insights and foresight.
Humorous to the point
that he can still make people laugh
60 years after his death.
The portrait is a remarkable example
of modern art.
And a resolute spirit that is
very rarely seen in human history.
Churchill should inspire us,
not because he's such a hero,
but because he's so human.
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.
When I was small, we lived at Chartwell,
and my brother went running
down the corridor
into the inner sanctum
of Grandfather's study,
where none of us
were really allowed to go.
He said, ''Grandpapa, Grandpapa,
is it true
you're the greatest living Englishman?''
And he said, ''Yes, now bugger off.''
Although he was this great, patriotic,
sometimes bombastic believer
in the British Empire,
he was also basically a liberal.
He believed in progress.
He believed in freedom and opportunity.
I think he's more relevant than ever today
because the values he believed in
are under serious threat
and need to prevail.
In war, resolution.
In defeat, defiance.
In victory, magnanimity.
In peace, goodwill.
Subtitle translation by: Y. Yun