# Sir Winston Churchill
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [March 3, 2004, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406 "2004-03-03T23:22:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kris)
#### Post date: [March 3, 2004, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/1 "2004-03-03T23:22:48Z")
Was Winston Churchill’s role as wartime Prime Minister exaggerated?
Are there any instances similar to the bombing of Dresden that taint the reputation of the “greatest ever Briton”\*?
do you think Winston Churchill deserves his place in history? if not, why not!
Kris. 🙂
---
### Author:  [@kris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kris)
#### Post date: [March 3, 2004, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/2 "2004-03-03T23:24:55Z")
by exaggerated I mean was his role “hyped up” for propaganda purposes. I.E, was he just a front man and all the actual work was done by the Civil Service in Whitehall (Speechwriting, Military orders etc).
---
### Author:  [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)
#### Post date: [March 3, 2004, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/3 "2004-03-03T23:29:04Z")
Country leaders are always grossly hyped up.
There are many ‘greater’ britons than Winston IMO. Darwin, Brunel, Nelson.
Not that I have anything against Winston. I just don’t think hes’ in the same league as the others.
---
### Author:  [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/4 "2004-03-04T00:07:51Z")
> [@Lobsang](#):
>
> Country leaders are always grossly hyped up.
>
> There are many ‘greater’ britons than Winston IMO. Darwin, Brunel, Nelson.
>
> Not that I have anything against Winston. I just don’t think hes’ in the same league as the others.
No, he definitely wrote his own speeches.
However, it appears now that he wrote them in a semi-permanent alcoholic fog, so he may not have intended to be so eloquent…
For most people’s money I think you’d find Nelson is Britain’s greatest war hero.
---
### Author:  [@bonzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bonzer)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/5 "2004-03-04T00:31:14Z")
> [@kris](#):
>
> Are there any instances similar to the bombing of Dresden that taint the reputation of the “greatest ever Briton”\*?
Given the length of his career, it should be no surprise that there’s no end of disputed episodes for which some have personally blamed him: amongst others, Sidney Street, TonyPandy, Gallipolli and Mers el Kebir. None of these controverses are exactly obscure.
But in the case of Dresden, while he’d obviously endorsed Harris’ general strategy of area bombing German cities, my impression (though I’m willing to be corrected) is that it’s unlikely that he had to specifically approve that particular raid. This probably **is** an instance where the matter was dealt with by the underlings.
---
### Author:  [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/6 "2004-03-04T02:29:55Z")
Comparing Winston Churchill to Lord Nelson is like comparing Clark Gable to Babe Ruth and arguing Ruth was a better ballplayer than Gable was an actor. It’s a pointless comparison.
Churchill, while he had been a soldier, is revered more for his leadership as Prime Minister, which is a different role than Nelson’s being a sailor. While Nelson was the greatest admiral that ever lived, he wasn’t running the country.
Winston Churchill was a perfect example of being the right man at exactly the right time; he was a bulldog of a man who saw things in absolute terms and could make things happen by sheer force of will, but he was a bad politician, moody, and disinterested in any issue besides war. In 1940, Britain, and the world, really, absolutely needed a Prime Minister with Churchill’s specific traits. Any number of men who made good Prime Ministers at other times could have been catastrophically miscast in the role Churchill was asked to fill in 1940. Sheer, blind defiance and stubbornness was the order of the day.
---
### Author:  [@notquitekarpov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/notquitekarpov)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/7 "2004-03-04T09:25:26Z")
His role was key from 1940 until probably mid-1943. He could never work well with allies, not domestically and not internationally. By instinct he was dictatorial - although strangely was also a great parliamentarian. His traits were exactly what we needed when he took over, only sheer force of personality and willpower could keep us in the War and fighting.
His mission was accomplished once Germany declared War on the USA and history would have been kinder to him if he had gone soon afterwards. The combination of FDR’s death and Churchill calling and losing the General Election between VE-Day and VJ-Day created a dangerous vaccum of power and experience at the end of the War that had incalculable effects on the post-war picture of Europe.
He was also is own Minister of Defence which gave him a key influence on the direction of the British and Commonwealth war effort but was dangerously ignorant of military strategy, and much of the United Nation’s success was achieved in spite of his interference rather than because of it. Anyone reading Field-Marshall Lord Alanbrooke’s “War Diaries” (he was Chief of Imperial Defence Staff (Heads of the Army) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee)
([http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842125265/qid=1078390554/sr=1](http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842125265/qid=1078390554/sr=1)
-2/ref=sr\_1\_11\_2/202-7765093-2618228)
for the period will get a good insight into the workings of his mind - the genius and the idiocy of the man. It apparently was almost impossible to work with him or control his wilder ideas.
Churchill when he came back again as Prime Minister in the 1950’s was understandable a shadow of his former self and was certainly being “carried” by his Party by then. That too does his reputation no good at all. Finally one should not forget his performance as a “war leader” was not just in WW2, his period as Lord of the Admiralty in WW1 showed his inability to delegate, trust his commanders or frankly any strategic insight.
As a slight hijack IMHO Alan Brooke was possibly the greatest professional soldier Britain ever produced and certainly the greatest strategist active in WW2 - and deserves to be better known. He was certainly treated very shabbily by Churchill who needed the spotlight to only be for him.
---
### Author:  [@Patr100](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patr100)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 10:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/8 "2004-03-04T10:57:25Z")
> [@RickJay](#):
>
> Winston Churchill was a perfect example of being the right man at exactly the right time; he was a bulldog of a man who saw things in absolute terms and could make things happen by sheer force of will, but he was a bad politician, moody, and disinterested in any issue besides war. In 1940, Britain, and the world, really, absolutely needed a Prime Minister with Churchill’s specific traits. Any number of men who made good Prime Ministers at other times could have been catastrophically miscast in the role Churchill was asked to fill in 1940. Sheer, blind defiance and stubbornness was the order of the day.
Agree. The other main contender at the time at seems was Lord Halifax, who most likely would have tried to do a deal with Hitler. It’s chilling to think what the outcome might have been then.
---
### Author:  [@Asteroide](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Asteroide)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 12:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/9 "2004-03-04T12:42:33Z")
Churchill is alleged to have sacrificed the city of Coventry to prevent the Germans from becoming aware that their Ultra code had been breached.
Even assuming the allegation were true, you might consider this to be a sound strategic decision, so probably lower on the heinous-ometer than the bombing of Dresden.
[http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=107](http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=107)
---
### Author:  [@curly\_chick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/curly_chick)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/10 "2004-03-04T13:49:19Z")
I note a few people here mentioning the bombing of Dresden. I know that the reason that this is considered such an awful thing to do was because it was a civillian target.
Now, I have heard it said and read articles that say that Dresden was not a civillian target, that it was full of munitions factories at the time it was bombed.
Is this true or is it an attempt to untarntish, if you like, the reputations of Churchill and Harris and others for their involvement in the bombing of Dresden?
Does anyone here know?
---
### Author:  [@Steve\_Wright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_Wright)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/11 "2004-03-04T14:58:21Z")
While I’m not, generally speaking, in favour of bombing civilians, I can’t help but feel a certain amount of sympathy for Harris - the man was in an impossible position. Essentially - in the early stages of the war, at least - “precision” bombing was a joke; the RAF would lose several bomber crews every night, and they’d be lucky if they got a bomb within a mile of their intended target - literally.
But something had to be done to hurt Germany’s industrial capability, otherwise it would simply be a case of waiting for the inevitable invasion … so, Harris reasoned, if he couldn’t hit specific targets, he’d go for the infrastructure in a general (not to mention indiscriminate) way. If he couldn’t hit an industrial plant, he could cripple it by destroying the workers’ housing around it …
It was, bluntly, a ruthless and amoral (indeed, immoral) strategic decision. However, it was also, without a doubt, a factor in Britain’s survival and, ultimately, in the Allied victory. In Harris’ mind, I think, it came down to a choice between “killing innocent civilians” and “letting Hitler win”. Both bad alternatives, but one’s clearly worse than the other.
---
### Author:  [@the\_bean\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/the_bean_1)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/12 "2004-03-04T15:47:44Z")
I must admit it allways amazes me that so many people refer to the bombing of Dresden as some kind of wicked act. Lets not forget that the German airforce had killed many 1000,s of civillians
in allied cities, indeed my own mother was evacuated as a child from London after being bombed out of 6 houses in 4 months. The raids on Dresden were both strategic and pschycological, strategic in terms of the railway systems running through it, linking many industrial areas in Germany, and
pschycological in terms of demoralising the German civilian population.
As to Churchill, he was the best man for the job in that time, his speaches were inspirational to both
military and civillians alike. He was forced to make decisions that he found both difficult and morally repugnant, but they needed to be taken. A good reference to the man is to be found in the book
on his private correspondance between him and his wife, it was serialised on radio a couple of years back. It gives a good insight to the difference between what he really thought and what he knew had to be said and done.
---
### Author:  [@sqweels](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sqweels)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/13 "2004-03-04T16:31:09Z")
> [@](#):
>
> The raids on Dresden were both strategic and pschycological, strategic in terms of the railway systems running through it, linking many industrial areas in Germany, and pschycological in terms of demoralising the German civilian population.
But by Feb. 1945 the war was effectively won. My understanding is that Dresden had been spared till then because it had little strategic value and that Churchill ordered the city attacked in order to punish Germany for their stubborn refusal to surrender.
---
### Author:  [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/14 "2004-03-04T18:33:34Z")
> [@](#):
>
> But by Feb. 1945 the war was effectively won. My understanding is that Dresden had been spared till then because it had little strategic value and that Churchill ordered the city attacked in order to punish Germany for their stubborn refusal to surrender.
And those were sound military reasons. The war might have been won, but Germany was not yet defeated, and would do their best to make the Allies pay. Bombing Dresden was a threat to the rest of Germany that further resistance would only make the conflict worse for them.
But Dresden was spared before that largely because it was far away from the front and no one felt the need to send bombers over that much hostile territory.
The major fact of the matter is that in Industrial Age warfare, like most eras of war before and after it, civlians are the lifeblood of the war effort. There really is no disctinction between them and soldiers. Morally, there ain’t a whole lotta difference between a soldier with a gun and the men who made the guns, bombs, and whatnot, the bureaucrats who pay any of them, or the farmer who feeds them.
---
### Author:  [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)
#### Post date: [March 4, 2004, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/15 "2004-03-04T19:37:21Z")
As a previous poster has noted, Churchill was a man for his time. No other leader had the courage to keep going when things looked so black for the UK. Consider this: after Dunkirk, Great Britain had essenially exhausted its credit in the USA…England was down to its final gold reserves, and the expectation was that the Lufwaffe wouldbomb London to ruins. Churchill had the courage to lead his nation!
As for his faults, GALLIPOLI is most often cited. I think Gallipoli was a brilliant idea…its just that having the thoroughly incompetent Gen. Birdwood run it was a prescription for disaster! Likewise, the Royal Navy never really supported the Gallipoli effort-had a fraction of the men and resources that were wasted in Ypres been sent to Gallipoli, Turkey would have been knocked out of the war, and Russia would have invaded Austria…the war propably would have been won by the Allies 3 years earlier! :eek:
---
### Author:  [@schplebordnik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/schplebordnik)
#### Post date: [March 5, 2004, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/16 "2004-03-05T02:27:53Z")
> [@curly chick](#):
>
> I note a few people here mentioning the bombing of Dresden. I know that the reason that this is considered such an awful thing to do was because it was a civillian target.
>
> Now, I have heard it said and read articles that say that Dresden was not a civillian target, that it was full of munitions factories at the time it was bombed.
>
> Is this true or is it an attempt to untarntish, if you like, the reputations of Churchill and Harris and others for their involvement in the bombing of Dresden?
>
> Does anyone here know?
Good article (and new book) on Dresden and whether it was in fact the horror it has been made out to be:
[http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2004/03/01/dresden/index\_np.html](http://archive.salon.com/books/review/2004/03/01/dresden/index_np.html)
---
### Author:  [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)
#### Post date: [March 5, 2004, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/17 "2004-03-05T18:16:56Z")
I was about to mention that his most famous radio speeches were actually recited by an actor named Norman Shelley, until finding that debunked [here](http://216.123.50.100/fh114atlantic.htm) among other places.
> [@](#):
>
> What Shelley recorded, apparently in 1943, was an obscure, unpublished Churchill speech, the origin of which has eluded even the Churchill Archives. Neither the Prime Minister’s 13 May speech (“Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat”) nor his 4 June speech (“Fight on the Beaches”) was even broadcast by anyone purporting to be Churchill. Sir Martin Gilbert’s official biography does quote a letter by Vita Sackville-West of 4 June, implying that at least part of that speech was repeated by the BBC announcer (Winston S. Churchill, London: Heinemann, 1983, VI:469). Shelley may have recorded the “Beaches” speech later, possibly for the BBC overseas service, but no one has ever been able to track this.
The rest of that book review is a fine rant, well worth reading for the entertainment value of seeing Christopher Hitchens get ripped a new one.
---
### Author:  [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)
#### Post date: [March 5, 2004, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/18 "2004-03-05T20:22:50Z")
Churchill was the right man at the right time. Beyond that, let us not forget his role in WW1, and calling it correctly in the 1930s when no-one else would see Hitler’s menace.
Dresden has usually been laid at the feet of Harris, but apparently it was at the request of Stalin, and Dresden was a transit point for troops and therefore a legitimate target quite apart from the factories.
In this modern day of the laser-guided or GPS-guided bomb, people forget how innacurate bombing used to be.
BTW when Googling, I discovered that a major work on this was done by David Irving: isn’t he the guy who doesn’t believe the Holocaust happenned? If so, his work is highly suspect.
---
### Author:  [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2004, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/19 "2004-03-06T07:14:14Z")
Does greatest Briton have to be either Churchill or Nelson? Are we sure that if either of these men hadn’t been born, English would be as dead (or on artificial life-support) a language as Cornish, replaced by either French or German?
Nelson was inspired to depart from the strict line-ahead tactics of warfare at sea, but it’s not like he genralized and expanded on this and invented chaos theory, or his “band of brothers” style of leadership that kept the French & Spanish fleets from landing an invasion led to new methods of management.
Same thing with Churchill - both these men’s genuis was pretty much ad hoc, and while tenacity is indeed a virtue, it’s only one rung above physical courage, which any bulldog has and may be why it’s a national symbol.
While Nelson & Chirchill countered the threatening evils of their day - Bonapartism and Nazism, and grateful we must be; I’d put Issac Newton higher up as greatest Briton, since he actually contributed to human growth.
(I think Dresden, like Nagasaki, was more for the Russians than for the Germans & Japanese. But, either out of spite or to sow the seeds of a re-invasion, Churchill brokered the Irish settlement in a what was guaranteed to provoke the Irish Civil War and the Troubles that continued into the 1990’s. He would’ve one the same thing and made the India/Pakistan situation even worse than it is if he hadn’t been voted out of office).
---
### Author:  [@Buran](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buran)
#### Post date: [March 6, 2004, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sir-winston-churchill/232406/20 "2004-03-06T13:18:44Z")
My attitude to Churchill is mixed, while recognising his many fine attributes (he was indeed the man Britain needed at that moment in time) as Slithy Tove has mentioned, his attitude to Ireland leaves a bitter taste.
Currently reading “In Time of War” about Irelands choice to remain neutral during the Second World War and the problems on Northern Irelands inclusion in the UK during that period. They were unable and unwilling to enforce conscription there for example.
Churchill does not come off well…his attitude towards Ireland could be described as patronising and misguided at best, positively malicious at worst.
BTW Just an aside, Belfast was bombed _before_ Coventry and suffered significently more casualties, and yet its never mentioned…