Lord Acton once quipped, “Great men are always bad men.” And if one thinks about it, look at *all* the so-called great leaders of history. Is there a single one who didn’t have larger-than-normal feet of clay?
More importantly, can you name a single significant leader of a major nation under whom there was no great injustice? This applies to every single American president (except for those who didn’t live long enough). By such standards, *all* American presidents — and all PM’s of France and the UK across the centuries— have been murderous bastards for whom hanging is too kind a punishment. Even Mohandas Gandhi would have belonged in jail.
Look at Churchill. Yes, today he is held responsible for the Indian famine and for Gallipoli. However, even if he is 1000% guilty of all those deaths, the case can be made that without Churchill himself on our side, Nazi Germany would probably have won WWII. It was his leadership that kept the UK in the fight, his oratory that lifted the peoples’ souls and kept them motivated, and his diplomacy that enabled not only the Lend-Lease shipments to Russia through both Murmansk and through the Middle East, but also kept the supplies flowing from America to the UK itself.
If the UK had agreed to a peace deal with the Nazis (as many in the UK wanted, including many in Parliament), then Hitler would likely not have declared war on the U.S. when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and FDR would probably not have declared war on Germany — remember that most of America was isolationist at the time, and many, many American vets of WWI were not just alive but politically influential and remembered the Great War all too well. The Russians would have faced the whole of the Wehrmacht, including all the divisions and aircraft that were kept in western Europe and in northern Africa. What’s more, the Nazis would have been able to mostly ignore the need to build ships and U-boats and instead use their industrial capacity for the Eastern Front to face a Russia that was receiving little if any material support from the West.
Does all that exonerate Churchill? If we strictly follow moralistic codes, certainly not. But if we take a larger view of the grand sweep of history, it would likely have been one of the great tragedies of history had not Winston Churchill been there for the Allies at the right place and the right time.
