Churchill’s 1940 Decision Shows How Leaders Still Shape History

Andrew Roberts rejects the idea that political events are merely “surface disturbances” atop deeper currents of geography, demography, and economic structure. Those impersonal forces exist, he says, and matter enormously in subjects such as industrialization or the rise of science. But they do not eliminate individual agency where decisions turn on war, statecraft, and political judgment.

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 would not have occurred without Napoleon Bonaparte, Roberts argues. Nor, in his view, can Britain’s decision to continue fighting in 1940 be separated from Winston Churchill. Larger conditions set constraints and create pressures, but particular people still direct events within them.

That position is not a claim that great figures act alone or manufacture public will from nothing. Churchill himself described his wartime speeches as an expression of the will of Parliament and the country: Britain and its empire had “the lion’s heart,” he said; he had merely been called upon “to give the roar.” Peter Robinson reads that formulation as a distinctive account of leadership: Churchill knew his exceptional gifts, but understood himself as answerable to a people whose courage he voiced.

Roberts accepts the humility of Churchill’s phrasing only up to a point. In May 1940, after military defeat in France, a negotiated arrangement with Germany would have been acceptable—perhaps even relieving—to much of the British establishment, he says. Churchill would not have been removed by his party, the House of Lords, the press, the monarchy, or the Church of England for accepting one. Lord Halifax, then foreign secretary and, in Roberts’s account, the personification of that establishment, was pushing in precisely that direction.

Roberts’s preferred counterfactual makes the stakes explicit. Had Halifax become prime minister and concluded an “ignoble peace” with Hitler, he suggests, Germany could have attacked the Soviet Union without retaining forces in the West. If Hitler had then driven Stalin beyond the Urals, a Nazi empire might have stretched from Brest to the Urals. Roberts does not present that outcome as assured. His point is that Churchill’s presence changed Britain’s choices and, potentially, the shape of the war.

Structures may explain the field on which governments act. They do not, by themselves, decide whether a government fights, compromises, or recognizes a threat differently from its contemporaries.

The defacement of Churchill’s Parliament Square statue with the words “Churchill was a racist” poses a charge Andrew Roberts does not deny. By current standards, he says, Churchill was racist: he believed in a hierarchy of races with white people at the top. Born in 1874, Churchill shared assumptions then presented as scientific knowledge—assumptions Roberts calls obscene and absurd by contemporary understanding.

But Roberts resists treating that belief as a complete moral or political account of Churchill. He distinguishes it from what he calls the modern racist’s desire for harm to befall people deemed inferior. Churchill, he argues, was not that person. Roberts cites Churchill’s efforts to protect Punjabi farmers on the Northwest Frontier, to end slavery in Sudan, to assist African groups while prime minister, and his military opposition to the Boers’ oppression of Black South Africans.

In Roberts’s account, Churchill’s imperial outlook included a paternalistic idea of obligation. He believed Britain owed the peoples of its empire responsibility for their welfare, a duty grounded in privilege and noblesse obligeThe idea that privilege carries obligations toward others.. That does not erase the hierarchy; it explains why Roberts thinks the hierarchy alone does not establish that Churchill wished suffering on nonwhite subjects.

The same distinction applies, Roberts says, to Churchill’s attachment to the “English-speaking peoples.” The category was not synonymous with whiteness. Caribbean and West Indian possessions belonged to it, and their populations fought in both world wars. Conversely, many white populations fell outside it. Churchill’s idealized English-speaking inheritance referred, Roberts says, to law, literature, representative institutions, and a shared political outlook—not to race itself. The categories overlap but are not interchangeable.

Roberts’s strongest objection is directed at a National Portrait Gallery video installation that accused Churchill of willfully starving millions during the Bengal famine of 1943. He calls the allegation a “foul lie.” He wrote a letter protesting it, signed by 50 peers from different parties; the installation was subsequently withdrawn.

The source displayed reporting from The Independent describing the dispute over artist Helen Cammock’s installation, Persistence, and a BBC report under the headline “National Portrait Gallery display withdrawn after Churchill row.” Together, those on-screen documents establish the immediate institutional context for Roberts’s account of the intervention, though his explanation of the famine and Churchill’s role remains his own historical argument.

Roberts attributes the famine to a convergence of wartime disaster and disruption: a cyclone in October 1942 that destroyed Bengal’s rail and road networks, Japanese control of Burma, Malaya, and Thailand, and Japanese submarines in the Bay of Bengal. Those conditions, he says, cut off routes through which Bengal had received rice and other food.

He says Churchill appealed to Roosevelt and to the prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, resulting in grain shipments to Bengal.

Millions died, Roberts acknowledges. His objection is specifically to the assertion of intentionality: that Churchill wanted Bengalis to die. He further says that historians who have examined the evidence do not support that claim, apart from two Hindu nationalist writers in India whom he does not regard as credible historians.

The distinction matters to Roberts because Churchill’s record, in his telling, should be judged as a record of consequential but fallible choices rather than reduced to either a monument or an indictment. Churchill’s racial beliefs are part of that record; Roberts argues that they do not settle every question about his conduct.

Andrew Roberts places Churchill’s refusal to seek a settlement in 1940 within an assessment of Nazism itself. Britain could not safely make an arrangement with Hitler, he argues, because Nazism was not simply another European regime pursuing interests that could be negotiated. Churchill saw its fanaticism, antisemitism, and imperial ambition more clearly than much of Britain’s governing establishment did.

The question was not simply whether Britain had suffered military defeat in France, or whether an agreement might buy time. It was whether Hitler could be accommodated at all. Churchill’s answer was no: Britain had to fight on.

Roberts gives three reasons for Churchill’s unusually forceful reading of the danger. First, Churchill was an historian. He saw Hitler as the latest in a long line of continental threats to Britain—after Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and the Kaiser—and treated resistance as part of a recurring national task rather than an unprecedented gamble.

Second, Roberts calls Churchill a philo-Semite. Churchill grew up around Jews, shared his father’s favorable disposition toward them, vacationed with Jewish friends, supported the Balfour Declaration, and regarded Jews as central to Judeo-Christian civilization. In Roberts’s view, this made Churchill more alert to Nazi antisemitism and its significance than many contemporaries in Britain, some of whom were themselves antisemitic.

Third, Churchill had encountered violent religious and political fervor in his own military experience. Roberts points to his service on the Northwest Frontier against the Talib, whom he calls the grandfathers of the Taliban, and to Churchill’s campaigning in Sudan against the Mahdi. Churchill was not merely seeking adventure in those experiences, Roberts says; his writing, including The River War, shows him thinking about the movements he fought. A passage concerning what Roberts calls “essentially Islamicism” was later removed when Churchill became colonial secretary, responsible for 300 million Muslims.

Taken together, Roberts argues, these experiences gave Churchill an appreciation of Hitler’s mind that the prime ministers of the 1930s—Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain—did not possess. His case is not that Churchill alone had courage. It is that Churchill believed compromise with a fanatical regime would not neutralize the threat.

That premise also informs Roberts’s view of unconditional surrender. He rejects Vice President J.D. Vance’s statement that every major conflict ends with some kind of negotiation. At Casablanca in January 1943, Roosevelt, supported by Churchill, declared unconditional surrender as the Allied war aim for Germany. Hitler died by suicide, and Karl Dönitz surrendered days later. Japan, Roberts notes, surrendered after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For Roberts, Japan’s conduct after Hiroshima bears directly on claims that a negotiated end could have avoided the atomic attacks. He says the Imperial War Council chose to continue fighting after the first bomb, despite knowing the destruction and the estimated 80,000 killed. It took the second bomb before Japan ultimately surrendered.

Robinson asks whether democracies can readily imagine regimes prepared to accept destruction rather than concede. He points to the deadlock in Japan even after the second bomb, which required the emperor’s intervention, and to the deaths of the Goebbels children in the Berlin bunker. Roberts agrees that Nazism and Japanese imperialism involved a fanaticism difficult for Western democrats to grasp. He extends that observation to Hamas’s refusal, in his view, to stop fighting before military defeat in Gaza, and to Iran’s use of diplomacy while holding out as long as possible.

For Roberts, this is the historical judgment that made Churchill consequential: a leader must assess not only material constraints and the costs of resistance, but the intentions and political character of the adversary across the table.

The current dispute over Churchill is not confined to his imperial record. Andrew Roberts also objects to accounts that make Churchill the principal cause of the war he led Britain through.

Darryl Cooper called Churchill the “chief villain” of the Second World War and argued that he turned a limited European conflict into a world war. Roberts rejects this on chronology alone. Churchill was not a cabinet minister when war began on September 1, 1939. He became First Lord of the Admiralty that day, but did not become prime minister until after Hitler had invaded Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

Roberts also disputes Tucker Carlson’s description of Cooper as America’s best and most honest popular historian, noting that Cooper has not written a history book. The concern is sharpened, in Roberts’s telling, by the scale of the audience: he says the Carlson-Cooper discussion received 33 million downloads.

Carlson’s treatment of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, is for Roberts a compact example of the reframing he opposes. Carlson described Mosley as the leader of Churchill’s “opposition party,” a great First World War hero, and a former MP imprisoned for the entire war.

Roberts says the British Union of Fascists had no MPs and no parliamentary representation; it was not the opposition party. Mosley had been a Conservative and Labour MP in the 1920s, but was not an MP during the war and failed to win election as a fascist. He was interned under Regulation 18B from May 1940 until November 1943, rather than for the whole war, and was released after the immediate invasion threat had passed.

Mosley served briefly in the trenches and then in the Royal Flying Corps, but Roberts says he was not among the roughly 38,000 people decorated for gallantry in the First World War. Some members of the British Union of Fascists enlisted and fought bravely for Britain after the war began, he acknowledges. Yet he describes the organization as overtly fascist, with Blackshirt formations modeled on German and Italian counterparts. Britain had already seen collaboration in occupied European countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, and France; William Joyce, later known as Lord Haw-Haw, had been a Mosley follower before going to Germany as a Nazi propagandist.

Roberts considers the internment a parliamentary authorized security measure against a movement whose conduct in the event of German invasion could not be known. His broader objection is to a narrative in which Churchill’s resistance becomes villainy and British fascists become a suppressed democratic opposition.

Andrew Roberts does not treat Churchill as a ready-made authority for every contemporary argument. Instead, he uses Churchill to draw distinctions that he believes current British politics often obscures.

On Europe, Churchill favored a United States of Europe because he did not want France and Germany to go to war again, Roberts says. The costs of both world wars were personal to Churchill, who had lost friends and family members. But in speeches at The Hague and Strasbourg, Roberts argues, Churchill also made clear that Britain should not be part of that European state.

That is why he rejects Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames’s assertion that Churchill would have opposed Brexit. Rather than speculate about 2016, Roberts says, readers should attend to what Churchill said in 1946 and 1948. He recalls Churchill’s pre-D-Day remark to Charles de Gaulle that, when Britain had to choose between “the continent and the open sea,” it would choose the open sea—a phrase Roberts understands as pointing to the United States, the Commonwealth, and the wider English-speaking world.

The same resistance to simple labels shapes his treatment of domestic policy. Churchill briefly adopted a strong free-market line after reading Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1945 and was decisively defeated in that year’s election. In his second premiership he ended rationing, moved cautiously toward freer markets, and denationalized iron and steel, but lacked the funds to reverse much more nationalization.

At the same time, Churchill and Lloyd George helped found Britain’s welfare state. Roberts traces that tradition through Disraeli and Bismarck: the state should protect the poorest and insure people against unemployment and accidents. What it did not entail, he argues, was the proposition that poor people become richer by making rich people poorer, or that government should impose equality as an economic end.

That distinction frames his criticism of proposals by Prime Minister Andy Burnham to bring energy, housing, water, and transport under stronger public control. Roberts calls the prospect of nationalizing companies such as BP and Shell economically ludicrous. He sees Burnham’s Labour Party as pursuing a more ideological socialism under terms such as “progressivism,” and predicts that its plans for land taxes, wealth taxes, and transfers from London and the Southeast to other regions will test its popularity.

On immigration, Roberts calls the Conservative government’s post-Brexit record a “massive disaster.” Britain left the European Union and then won a large majority in 2019, he says, but did not leave the European Court of Human Rights or the 1951 Refugee Convention. In his account, courts and lawyers used those frameworks to block deportations, including of people who had entered Britain illegally. Kemi Badenoch’s stated willingness to leave the European Court of Human Rights is, for Roberts, one reason not to write off England.

Churchill’s likely dealings with Donald Trump would have followed a similarly practical principle, he suggests. Churchill made relationships with American presidents a matter of British national interest even when those relationships were difficult. He got on with Roosevelt and Truman because Britain needed the United States. Eisenhower was a personal friend, though Churchill privately favored Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 because he considered Eisenhower too aggressive toward the Soviet Union after it acquired nuclear weapons.

Roberts also resists the image of Churchill as consistently prescient in the postwar world. Churchill’s wartime cables urging the Allies to seize Berlin were, he says, “performative.” Montgomery was not in a position to lose the 80,000 men the Soviets lost taking the city, and Churchill had already agreed to the relevant demarcation lines with the Soviet Union. Taking Berlin would have meant overriding those arrangements and risked a new war with Russia.

The inheritance Roberts identifies is therefore not a finished political program: national independence need not mean hostility to European cooperation; a welfare state need not require socialism; and an alliance with an American president remains a matter of national interest even without personal or ideological affinity.

Andrew Roberts grew up in a Britain where the Second World War remained physically and socially present. He was only 18 months old when Churchill died and had no direct memory of him, though as a child he initially conflated Churchill with his obese, cigar-smoking, brandy-drinking grandfather. His great-uncle had served in Bomber Command; wartime films and magazines saturated school life; bomb-damaged gaps still marked London streets.

That proximity has now gone. Of roughly 120 people Roberts interviewed for his Churchill biography—people who had known or worked with Churchill—not one remains alive. Churchill’s niece, who died at 100, was the last. The past no longer arrives through parents, veterans, colleagues, or chance encounters with someone who can make the trenches sound like yesterday.

Roberts reaches for Abraham Lincoln’s phrase about “the silent artillery of time.” In the Lyceum Address, Lincoln described the passing of the Revolutionary generation: history that had once lived in every family was disappearing beyond recovery. For Roberts, the disappearance of Churchill’s contemporaries creates the same obligation. If children and grandchildren cannot hear about the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, or the trenches firsthand, they must encounter the past through reading and serious study.

That obligation extends beyond Churchill. Roberts admires the American founding partly because figures of unusual ability appeared together in the 1770s: John Adams as organizer, Thomas Jefferson as wordsmith, alongside Washington, Hamilton, and Madison. The Federalist Papers and the Constitution represent a level of public reasoning he doubts could be reproduced today.

He sees a coarsening of public discourse, driven in part by social media. Quoting Niall Ferguson, Roberts calls the internet “the lavatory wall of the world.” He says scientific reports and surveys show attention spans collapsing over the past two decades. He can identify the symptoms, he says, but does not claim to know the cure.

Churchill’s advice to a young American student crossing Westminster Hall on Coronation Day in 1953 supplies Roberts’s answer.

For Roberts, studying history does not mean venerating famous people or treating their success as inevitable. It means learning how they interpreted inherited constraints, assessed enemies, and chose among alternatives that were often politically easier than the course they took.