Notes: Churchill, Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
Short notes on Churchill and tech/science + Churchill's prescient understanding of the nature of communism and nazism + the prison escape
In the last year I’ve been surprised to discover that Churchill is a much greater character than I’d understood, closer to a Napoleonic figure. I read Roberts’ Walking with Destiny and Kersaudy’s Churchill. A couple highlights:
Learning that the British establishment were keen on making peace with Hitler at the start of the war, and that it would very likely have happened if not for Churchill.1
Churchill’s escape from prison during the Boer war aged 25.
Churchill presciently writing about a nuclear weapon in 1924, a full 18 years before the Manhattan project.
And of course some great rhetoric. Here are a couple disorderly notes on the matter, which can each be read independently.
Churchill the aristocrat
Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, the British equivalent of Versailles, home of his ancestor the first duke of Marlborough, who led the combined armies of Europe to victory against Louis XIVth in the early 1700s and helped establish Britain as a first rate European power. Decent pedigree, then. This, and growing up around dukes and earls and whatnot was pretty good for his self confidence later in life. Example:
‘Many thanks for your letter. I am entirely indifferent to such opinions as you mention.’ (p. 432) is a reply characteristic of his aristocratic insouciance (“zero fucks given”, in modern parlance). It was his response to an acquaintance who mentioned to him that Tory MPs thought he was up to no good after he was one of only four MPs who did not cheer on Chamberlain’s visit to Hitler in 1938.2 As we’ll see later, the House of Commons (not to mention the Lords) didn’t exactly shine in the 1930s.
Churchill the young hot-head
He grew up idolising his father, who was chancellor of the Exchequer, and his ancestor, the first duke Marlborough, who is still remembered for having never lost a battle.3 Naturally enough, Winston went to military school. However he wasn’t deemed intelligent enough by his dad or the teachers to be taught military strategy (let alone go to Oxford). So he enlisted as a cavalry officer. This lack of training in strategic thinking later cost the lives of a few soldiers, ahem. He was a bit of a hot-head, and in the summer of 1895, between academic terms, used his family connections at the Spanish royal court to join their war in Cuba. He needed authorisation to join them in their war against cuban guerillas. This is where he first saw combat.
Such proactivity turned out to be a pattern, Churchill later always sought to be wherever the action was: when his regiment in India had no fighting to do, he begged (and obtained) to be moved to a regiment that was fighting in the north west, once the Empire started fighting the Boers in South Africa, he ensured he got sent to the front,4 and AGAIN (because volunteering for just three wars isn’t enough) he voluntarily joined General Kitchener fighting in the Sudan, where he was a part of the last major cavalry charge of the 19th century. He’d definitely have rushed to Ukraine in 2022.
Churchill and technology
Churchill read a book on quantum theory in 1926 and was publicly writing about the development of nuclear weapon in the 1924. He also pushed for the creation of a large RAF after WWI, which undoubtedly saved the UK in 1940. Then he invented the tank. “His early, strong and sustained support for its development makes it plausible for him to be described as the father of the tank.” (p. 198) He was also prescient about switching the royal navy from coal to oil,5 which meant less re-fuelling stops, better range, and not needing crew shovelling coal into the furnace all the time.
I have to say the quantum thing surprised me more than a bit.
Churchill the blogger
And later Nobel Prize in Literature (1953).
He first became known to the public by writing newspaper articles, and then a whole book for each new war he participated in. I’m convinced that today he’d first get known as a blogger before entering the House of Commons.6 Leo Strauss said Churchill’s biography of Marlborough was “the greatest historical work written in our century, an inexhaustible mine of political wisdom and understanding”.7
Churchill escapes from prison aged 25
His first big break onto the national scene is when he escaped prison during the Boer war, leaving a note politely saying that he had “decided to escape from custody”, and “had to cross 300 miles of enemy territory with no map, compass, food, money, firearm or knowledge of Afrikaans” (p.69). He was 25. His escape, which involved hopping onto a coal train, and hiding in a rat-infested mine for days was the only heroic British event of the war until then, and propelled him onto the national scene. So yeah, I guess I haven’t done that much this week then.
Churchillian rule of war: *crush* the other guy, then be nice
I tried to extract a couple general Churchillian rules of conduct from the book. It’s hard to pin them down precisely but one of them is certainly the above.
In the Boer war, he insisted the Boers be treated well (they were, and he later became best friends with Jan Smuts, the Boer prime minister, who was of good counsel in WWII). In 1918, he detested the Versailles treaty for its harshness, predicting there would be war again and calling it “a sad story of complicated idiocy”. Prophetic words.
This idea served him well when someone with a say in the conduct of the war (I forget who8) suggested that Germany be “pastoralised” (turned into a farming country, i.e. have its industry dismantled), as he realised that a strong Germany would be a good counterweight to the USSR.9
Great Britain was an inch away from making peace with the Nazis
One thing I didn’t realise before reading this biography is just how close Great Britain was to making peace with Hitler in 1938.
At this point in time, Churchill has been saying for almost a decade that Britain needs to re-arm so she can avert war with Germany. Everyone just called him a warmonger. In fact, most of the establishment, including Lord Halifax (who was in second place for the premiership) wanted to know what terms of surrender Hitler would have been, and according to Andrew Roberts “they would probably have been very reasonable, as the Führer ultimately wanted to fight a one-front war against the USSR”.
Churchill was ~ the only guy ~ who wanted to fight, it seems crazy that such a big difference was made by one person. Although since the USSR handled three quarters of the Wehrmacht perhaps it wouldn’t have changed the outcome for the nazis? But it would certainly have changed the post war east-west power dynamics which is no small matter given how many people died under communism.
The common view was so much against him that as late as 1938 the Conservative Central Office tried to ensure he could not run for office in Epping, his constituency in the House of Commons.10
“Halifax was merely a logical rationalist when the need was for a stubborn, emotional romantic.” (p. 978), I wonder what our modern rationalists would do?
Certainly Churchill’s adage “Man is spirit” seems a bit at odds with “P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary” (the slatestarcodex blog motto, and un-official rationalist creed). My view on this is that when it comes to government, we probably want the rationalists “on tap, not on top” as Churchill said of scientists in the ‘40s.1112
Churchill’s prescient views on communism
It’s pretty avant-garde (read: fucking prophetic) to see through communist ideas as precisely as Churchill did in 1917.13 Sartre was still a communist well into the ‘50s.14
Churchill described the Russian Revolution as ‘a tide of ruin in which perhaps a score of millions of human beings have been engulfed. The consequences of these events … will darken the world for our children’s children.’ This was both prophetic and numerically precise – at least twenty million people died under Soviet tyranny – yet his anti-Communism was to cost him a great deal politically. (p.256)
Later fun Churchill quip about communism: “the foul baboonery of Communism” (1919). He said what he thought about Communism at least once to the face of Stalin and Ivan Maisky, the soviet ambassador in London during the war.
Great English rhetoric
One pattern I noticed in quips15 I enjoyed: rimes embrassées. Examples:
“Ivor Guest opined that ‘Few fathers had done less for their sons. Few sons have done more for their fathers.’” (p. 101)
“The great question is – are political organizations made for men or men for political organizations?’” (p. 89)
“There are of course old men who cannot be expected to pay much attention to anything, and young men to whom nobody can be expected to pay much attention.’” (p. 86)
“I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.” (A line from Balfour about Churchill, p.64, different rime scheme, same idea)
A good and easy to recycle line: “I, of course, am exceedingly pro-French, Churchill asserted; ‘unfortunately the French are exceedingly pro-voking.’”(p. 784)
One final distinctly Churchillian rhetorical device: old words, especially when single-syllable. E.g. using “foe” not enemy, “Short words are the best and the old words when short are the best of all”.16
WWCD: What would Churchill do?
Netanyahu: currently violating Churchill’s rule of war, doesn’t look good long run. Elon’s “conspicuous acts of kindness” recommendation seems spot on here.
Zelensky: pretty good job muddling through (“Wars are mainly tales of muddling through”) and getting US support, needs to visit the most affected parts of the country as much as possible + an intense focus on technology (drones: good, what else? should they develop a nuke?) Ukrainian GDP is 10x less than Russia, so they’re going to need some tech here (or some Americans). Churchill was the father of the tank and the RAF, can Zelensky be the father of something big?17
Taiwan: USA needs to get the fleet ready, China outpaces US in shipbuilding, just like Germany when Churchill became first Lord of the Admiralty pre-WWI.
John Mearsheimer, the most interesting geopolitical commentator I know of, in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, seems to agree with this view.
keyword “cheer”, I found this hard to believe the first time I read it.
Napoleon brought a biography of Marlborough with him on his campaign in Egypt: “He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy” (p. 163, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts). Note that Eugène of Savoy was Marlborough’s closest associate in the conduct of the war against France.
In this one, he was on a train that got attacked by Louis Botha (incidentally the ancestor of Roelof Botha, the American billionaire venture-capitalist who runs Sequoia Capital, and once had the pleasure of meeting yours truly).
These lines from the book convey well this very Churchillian scene: “Churchill displayed great bravery and initiative in leading some survivors out on to the track and then spending half an hour heaving the two overturned trucks off the line so that the badly damaged engine with fifty survivors could escape back to Estcourt, most of them wounded, while he stayed to rally the rest of the trapped and outnumbered troops. In all he spent about ninety minutes under almost continuous fire. The Boers were famously accurate snipers, and he was lucky to have survived. Back in Estcourt, Atkins met a dozen of the escaped fugitives and pieced together what had happened. ‘We heard how Churchill had walked round and round the wreckage while the bullets were hitting against the iron walls, and had called for volunteers to free the engine; how he had said “Keep cool, men,” and again, “This will be interesting for my paper!”” (emphasis mine). This is far from the last time that Churchill seems to be saved by providence from certain death.
Daniel Yergin named his pulitzer-prize winning book The Prize after a line of Churchill’s, “mastery [over the seas] was the prize of the venture [→ switching to oil]”.
I may report back on this, having recently started it.
It was Roosevelt.
More pedestrian use-case of this principle: What do you do if someone punches you in the head? Knock him out, then, once he awakens, offer him a glass of hot milk and ask him “What on earth were you thinking young man?”. This only half squares with Mathew 5:38 about turning the other cheek, but I think it’s a good practical complement to the moral ideal.
Can you imagine being so wrong, so late? Crazy how hard they tried to kick out of his seat in the Commons the only guy who could lead them to victory only months before the onset of war.
One interesting parallel is with the American revolutionary war: George Washington was by far the least intellectual of the founding fathers, but a great leader. Would the others have done such a good job and left office? Obviously perfect rationality is perfect, but if it’s un-attainable, then there seems to be a good amount of hidden risk in the system if rationalists run the show? Not sure what I think of this, but I feel like the “on tap not on top” is probably right.
Another good instance of this:
“ ‘Here we have a state … nearly half a million of whose citizens,’ he said, ‘reduced to servitude for their political opinions, are rotting and freezing through the Arctic night; toiling to death in forests, mines and quarries, many for no more than indulging in that freedom of thought which has gradually raised man above the beast.’ This was written over twenty years before Alexander Solzhenitsyn started writing The Gulag Archipelago.” (p. 419)
What a way to put it; so correct, so early, and beautifully put. Surprising.
but tbf he was wrong about almost everything in his politics: he missed nazism after spending all of 1933 in Germany, was pro-Stalin for much too long, and started to realise the colonies weren’t all that great only in the ‘50s. It’s interesting to note that his classmate and friend Raymond Aron was prophetically right about all these things very early and yet was never nearly as popular (his Mémoires are an interesting intellectual and political history of France in the second half of the 20th century).
Sometimes directed at, and other times coming from Churchill.
The more full quote:
Back in September 1904, he had adopted a stylistic device that he was often to reprise: the use of four consecutive alliterative adjectives before a noun. Speaking of efficient local government being refused funds by an incompetent Whitehall, he had told the Reform Club of Manchester, ‘Like Oliver Twist, they ask for more; and Bumbledom and Beadledum can only stare, and answer with a sullen, senseless, solid, stupid “No.” ’144 His speaking technique adopted several other such deliberate techniques too. When Charles Eade congratulated him on the climax of his Manchester speech of 27 January 1940, he pointed out, wordsmith to wordsmith, ‘that he had used nearly all words of one syllable’.145 ‘Short words are the best and the old words when short are the best of all,’ Churchill said after the war.146 He also made full use of anaphora, the repetition of the same words or phrases in successive sentences – ‘We shall fight … we shall fight … we shall fight’ – a proven oratorical formula dating back to Demosthenes. In Kim, by Rudyard Kipling, one of Churchill’s favourite authors, there was a scene where seal pups are ‘fighting on the beaches, fighting in the surf’. (By total contrast with Churchill, Hitler virtually stopped making broadcasts once the war started going badly. During the whole of 1944, for example, he spoke on German radio only once.)
Roberts, Andrew. Churchill: Walking with Destiny (pp. 585-586). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Drones were good but they seem to have lost the initiative on that? I’ve heard it said that much like the Spanish civil war was the “trial run” of 20th century warfare, so Ukraine may turn out to be the trial run of 21st century warfare (drones, jamming, and hacking). I wonder what the calculus is on developing nukes? The main technical obstacles as I understand are: 1) getting Uranium, but Ukraine has plenty, more than the US does, and 2) refining the ore. Probably wouldn’t change things overnight but it would certainly change the balance of power in a way that favours the Ukrainians. Man giving up nukes for the Budapest memorandum really was a big big blunder.
Finally, thanks to Coline Rialan for a useful re-read.