“HISTORY,” WINSTON CHURCHILL said, “will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” He needn’t have bothered. Of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, he is the only one to have completely escaped the odium deservingly bestowed on his rivals Hitler and Stalin, to have been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for Literature, no less), and now even with an Oscar.

As Hollywood confirms, Churchill’s reputation as what Harold Evans has called “the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilisation” rests almost entirely on his stirring rhetoric during World War II. Churchill had nothing to offer but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. And, of course, an exceptional talent for a fine phrase. “We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end.... We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets.... We shall never surrender.” (The revisionist British historian John Charmley dismissed this as ‘sublime nonsense’.)

And what phrases he came up with! “You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.... You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” That victory, as Charmley has pointed out, resulted in the dissolution of the British Empire, and more immediately, in Churchill’s own defenestration by the war-weary British electorate in the elections of 1945. No wonder that not everyone was equally impressed by his oratory. The Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies remarked of Churchill during World War II: “His real tyrant is the glittering phrase, so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.”

Indeed, the ‘glittering phrase’ was always Churchill’s strongest suit. He never flinched from bombast: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’.” Such extravagant oratory helped steel the British at a time of great adversity, but their effect was only of the moment. Yet Churchill believed that ‘Words are the only things which last forever’. The hagiology from which he has benefited in recent years suggests that he may well have been right.

For words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. Actions are another matter altogether. Books and cinema have assiduously built up the image of Churchill the defiant bulldog who kept the British in World War II when so many of the establishment wanted peace, and Churchill the parliamentarian of rapier wit who dominated its politics at a time when Britain was the epicentre of a worldwide empire. Less well-known is the brash political upstart whose arrogance in cabinet meetings prompted Charles Hobhouse, postmaster general during World War I, to describe him as ‘ill-mannered, boastful, unprincipled and without any redeeming features’. The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes he authored on World War II led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to grant him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature— an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill’s self-justifying embellishments.

Embellishment was necessary, since Churchill had a great deal to be ashamed of. There was his disastrous judgment on military matters, going back to the horrendous defeat at Gallipoli in 1915, a plan he hatched when first lord of the Admiralty, and reflected again in Norway in 1940, as well as in his decision to delay the planned 1943 invasion of Europe in favour of a pointless diversionary campaign in North Africa in 1942 (which in turn led inevitably to the great Allied losses in Italy, where the topography overwhelmingly favoured the defenders). As a military strategist, Churchill was often in e

Source: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/essay/hero-or-war-criminal-churchill-in-retrospect