HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/winston-churchill Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:37:56 GMT en hourly 1 Tokugawa Ieyasu: Know when to prepare – and when to act https://www.historyextra.com/membership/tokugawa-ieyasu-know-when-to-prepare-and-when-to-act/ Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:26:33 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/tokugawa-ieyasu-know-when-to-prepare-and-when-to-act/ In the third episode of History's Greatest Leaders, entrepreneur and author Mike Soutar and historian Christopher Harding discuss the leadership style of 16th-century Japanese unifier Tokugawa Ieyasu Samurai and statesman Tokugawa Ieyasu founded the dynasty that unified Japan in the early 16th century. His house ruled the country for more than 250 years. He’s a towering figure from the nation’s history – a man capable of ruthless, decisive action, but who at other moments actively sought to avoid conflict and waited for his enemies to make mistakes.
In this episode, Christopher Harding – senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, and author of books including A Short History of Japan – guides Mike Soutar through the apparent contradictions of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s story, and reveals the lessons that this feudal lord can impart for the 21st century.
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]]> Winston Churchill: How to use dynamism to beat the odds https://www.historyextra.com/membership/winston-churchill-how-to-use-dynamism-to-beat-the-odds/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:42:30 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/winston-churchill-how-to-use-dynamism-to-beat-the-odds/ In the second episode of History's Greatest Leaders, entrepreneur and author Mike Soutar and historian and TV producer Taylor Downing discuss the leadership style of wartime PM Winston Churchill Britain's Second World War prime minister was an inspiring visionary who's often credited with saving western democracy through sheer force of will. Yet Churchill is also a man whose dogged determination, and uncompromising leadership style, could lead to tension and conflict.
In this episode, historian, author and TV producer Taylor Downing – whose books include The Army that Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception – tells Mike Soutar about the pros and cons of Churchill's high-intensity approach to management, and considers whether his leadership skills would stand up today's boardroom.
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For more on the life and legacy of Winston Churchill, don’t miss our curated collection of articles, podcasts and videos
]]> Churchill and the Crown https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-and-the-crown-podcast/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:16:03 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-and-the-crown-podcast/ Ted Powell charts the wartime leader’s lifelong relationship with the Crown, and how successive monarchs shaped both his political fortunes and Britain’s destiny Sir Winston Churchill was a passionate defender of Britain’s monarchy – but that didn’t mean he always saw eye to eye with the royals themselves.
Jon Bauckham talks to Ted Powell about Churchill’s complex relationship with the Crown – from his clashes with George V and controversial support for Edward VIII, to his role in guiding the young Elizabeth II through the early years of her reign.
]]> In 1940, Winston Churchill made a decision that may have won WW2. So why did it make him cry? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1940-winston-churchill-made-a-decision-that-may-have-won-ww2-so-why-did-it-make-him-cry/ Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:30:21 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1940-winston-churchill-made-a-decision-that-may-have-won-ww2-so-why-did-it-make-him-cry/ In July 1940, the Royal Navy attacked a French fleet off the coast of Algeria, killing more than 1,200 sailors. This "hateful" incident move Winston Churchill to tears. Yet, writes Edward Abel Smith, in giving the operation the green light, the British PM may have won the Second World War At just before 6pm on Wednesday 3 July 1940, the first shells were fired towards the coast of Algeria. Across the shimmering water of the harbour at Mers el-Kébir, the crews of a group of French warships had no idea what was coming. Earlier in the day, French sailors had been relaxing on deck. A bathing party had been ashore for a morning of recreation. It was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary day.
What followed was less than 10 minutes of ferocious shelling, the result of which was devastating. French battleship Bretagne took a direct hit, lurched forward and capsized in just minutes – the vast majority of the crew would not survive. Her sister ship, Provence, was ablaze. One of the most powerful battleships in the world, Dunkerque lay grounded, her hull torn open. In the oil-black water where the ships had been peacefully moored minutes before, bodies floated among the wreckage.
Rescue boats picked their way through the debris. Some survivors were so caked in oil that those trying to save them could find no grip – and so they were pulled from the water by their hair. The fleet's chaplain, Father de Gueuser, moved slowly through it all in a small rowboat, reciting prayers over objects he could not identify. He blessed them all, just in case.
In total, 1,297 French sailors were killed that afternoon. They were not killed by the Germans. They were not killed by the Italians. They were killed by the Royal Navy – acting on an order signed by Winston Churchill. The attack at Mers el-Kébir remains the deadliest clash between Britain and France since the battle of Waterloo, 125 years before. And it may also have been the decision that won the Second World War.
The world Churchill inherited
To understand why Churchill gave that order, it is important to understand the world as it looked from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street in the summer of 1940. It was a world in freefall.
Churchill had been prime minister for 55 days. In that time, he had watched Italy throw in its lot with Hitler, adding 1.7 million soldiers, six battleships and 100 submarines to the Nazi cause. Churchill had overseen the evacuation of over 330,000 Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk – hailed as a miracle, though the miracle had left behind 700 tanks, 64,000 vehicles and 76,000 tonnes of ammunition on the sand. Britain's ability to fight a land war was, in practical terms, finished. Churchill inherited a RAF that only had around 650 serviceable aircraft.
To add to the predicament, most of western Europe had fallen. France – Britain's closest ally, the nation with whom Churchill had personally pleaded to keep fighting – had signed an armistice with Hitler on 22 June, in the same railway carriage, in the same forest clearing, where Germany had surrendered in 1918. Hitler's choice of location was deliberate. He wanted the humiliation to be absolute.
Across the Channel, Britain stood entirely alone. Even Hitler assumed Churchill would eventually come to the table and seek terms. Chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the Führer wanted to give England “one last chance for peace”. Churchill had no intention of taking it – but he needed to prove that to the world, and most urgently to Washington.
The one military card Churchill still held was the Royal Navy. Britain remained, just about, the dominant naval power in the world – and through that dominance, in theory, it could still control the vital shipping lanes on which an island nation depended. However, the Royal Navy’s size would be overshadowed if Germany swallowed the French fleet into its own. Churchill was determined that would not happen.
The fleet that could change everything
France had the fourth-largest navy in the world – 800,000 tons of warships, seven battleships, 12 light cruisers, 71 destroyers, 78 submarines.
As France collapsed and sought armistice terms, Churchill appealed directly to French leaders not to let their fleet fall to Germany. He warned that to do so would “scarify their names for a thousand years of history”. His appeals went unheeded.
Churchill had confronted Admiral Darlan – commander-in-chief of the French navy – directly. “Darlan, I hope that you will never surrender the Fleet.” Darlan was emphatic: “There is no question of doing so. It would be contrary to our naval traditions and honour. We will never hand it over to Germany or Italy."
These were reassuring words. However, words were not enough. The armistice terms France had been offered were far more generous than expected – Hitler was being lenient, allowing the French to retain about two-fifths of their territory. The French negotiators knew that any further cooperation with Britain risked jeopardising their position. Darlan's promise was sincere in the moment. But Hitler could not be trusted to keep his promise. Germany's navy, the Kriegsmarine, was small – one of his genuine weaknesses. Adding even a fraction of the French fleet to it could shift the entire balance of the war at sea. Churchill could not afford to take Darlan at his word.
Late on the night of 2 July, Churchill sat with his First Lord of the Admiralty and First Sea Lord, debating whether to act. He had already received a letter from Vice Admiral Somerville, who was to command the operation, urging him in the strongest terms to avoid force. Churchill read the letter aloud and set it aside. Around half past midnight, Lord Beaverbrook – the newspaper magnate Churchill had drafted into the War Cabinet to transform aircraft production – was summoned to Downing Street. For an hour, Churchill walked him through the plan. Beaverbrook was unequivocal: attack was necessary. Germany would appropriate the French ships whether the French captains liked it or not. Britain's survival came first.
That was enough. Churchill authorised Operation Catapult – a simultaneous, co-ordinated attempt to seize or destroy French vessels across multiple locations. He ordered his admirals to prioritise the destruction of Dunkerque and Strasbourg, the two most powerful vessels in the French fleet posted at Mers el-Kébir.
After the admirals left at 2am, Churchill and Beaverbrook walked into the garden at the back of Downing Street. It was a blustery night, barely 14 degrees. As they talked, Beaverbrook saw tears in Churchill's eyes. “This is heartbreaking for me,” he said. He was convinced the decision was necessary. He also knew what it would cost.
Twelve hours that changed history
The task of delivering the ultimatum fell to Captain Holland – nicknamed 'Hookey' for his badly misshapen nose, the Royal Navy's finest French speaker and a man who genuinely loved France. His appointment as envoy was, on the face of it, an inspired choice by Vice Admiral Somerville, as Holland was highly respected by the French naval leadership.
He was dispatched ahead of the main fleet in the destroyer HMS Foxhound, carrying four options for the French commander at Mers el-Kébir, Vice Admiral Gensoul. The French could sail their ships to Britain and fight on. They could sail to a port in the West Indies or America, to be disarmed for the duration. They could scuttle where they lay. Or they could hand the ships over to the British. What they could not do – under any circumstances – was allow a single vessel to fall into German hands. If none of the four options was accepted, the code word was ANVIL. Then the British would take matters into their own hands, using force to put the French warships out of action.
Gensoul was a proud and brooding patriot with a deep-seated suspicion of the British. He was acutely insulted that Captain Holland – a man three ranks his junior – had been sent with an ultimatum, rather than a senior officer for proper negotiation. He refused to meet Holland in person for hours. All the while he was not simply being stubborn – he was buying time, quietly rearming his fleet, waiting for darkness, preparing either to escape or to fight back.
Throughout the day, Churchill waited anxiously in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street, cigar in hand, receiving regular updates from Somerville. His orders had been clear – the matter had to be resolved before nightfall. As the hours ticked by, Somerville extended his deadlines repeatedly: 1330 hours, 1500, 1530, 1730. At one point Holland stopped his signaller mid-transmission, unable to bring himself to send the final ultimatum. He had not slept since 2 July.
A brief, agonising near-breakthrough came in the early afternoon. Gensoul finally agreed to receive Holland aboard Dunkerque. The two men talked. Gensoul appeared to soften. For a moment, a peaceful resolution seemed possible. But the clock had run out. Somerville's final deadline was 1730. Soon, Holland was back in his motor cutter, pulling away from Dunkerque's side.
As the guns of Force H opened fire 14 minutes later, Holland was still in the water between the two fleets. He watched as enormous columns of orange flame erupted from the harbour. He did not look away.
War, alliance and the long shadow
The immediate aftermath was, for Churchill, one of the most charged moments of his entire premiership. In his memoir The Second World War, Volume II: Their Finest Hour, he would describe Mers el-Kébir as “a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned. It was a Greek tragedy. But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.”
The attack poisoned Franco-British relations. Skirmishes between the two nations broke out in Dakar, Syria and Lebanon. Trust between Britain and France would not fully recover for years.
But in Washington, the reaction was everything Churchill had hoped for. For all the British PM’s soaring rhetoric about fighting on the beaches and never surrendering, President Franklin D Roosevelt had remained privately uncertain that Britain would hold. Words were one thing. Ordering the Royal Navy to destroy its closest ally's fleet – at a cost of nearly 1,300 lives – was another entirely. As Churchill's private secretary, John Colville, later recalled, one of Roosevelt's closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, told him directly: “It was Mers el-Kébir which convinced President Roosevelt, in spite of opinions to the contrary, that the British really would go on fighting – as Churchill had promised, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.”
Shortly afterwards, Roosevelt signed the Destroyers for Bases Agreement – 50 American destroyers transferred to Britain – the first decisive step on the road to American involvement in the war. Lend-Lease (a policy that enabled the US to provide Allied nations with food, oil and military equipment) followed. Then the US navy began escorting convoys. The groundwork for American entry was being laid, and Churchill always believed Mers el-Kébir was the moment that made it possible.
- Read more | Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
The ultimate historical verdict came on 27 November 1942, when German troops occupied Toulon. The French navy scuttled its remaining ships – Strasbourg, which had been able to escape the British attacks at Mers el-Kébir, was among them – rather than let a single vessel fall into enemy hands.
“The voluntary destruction of the fleet at Toulon has just proved that I was right,” Darlan wrote defiantly to Churchill in December 1942, just a few days before the admiral’s assassination. In one sense, Darlan was not wrong – the French admirals had never intended to hand their ships to Germany. But would Hitler have seized them anyway?
What if Churchill had held back?
It is the great what-if of the early war. Had Churchill flinched – had he chosen to trust Darlan's promise, to give diplomacy more time, to hope for the best – the French fleet would almost certainly have remained intact through 1940 and into 1941.
Whether Germany would ultimately have seized it is unknowable. What is rather more knowable is what would not have happened: Roosevelt likely would not have been convinced that Britain was willing to fight on. Certainly not as soon as he did. The Destroyers for Bases Agreement might never have been signed. American support, when it came, might have come too late – or not at all. Without the naval convoys, the weapons, the men, it is very difficult to see how Britain would have survived the winter of 1940 and beyond.
History has largely judged Churchill's decision as correct – a brutal, sorrowful necessity at an impossible moment.
He called it a hateful decision. And he was right about that. But some decisions are both hateful and necessary, and the rarest quality in a leader is the willingness to make them anyway, in full knowledge of the cost, when the alternative is something worse. On the sweltering afternoon of 3 July 1940, in the harbour of a small Algerian port that almost nobody in Britain had heard of, Winston Churchill demonstrated that quality. It may well have saved Britain.
Edward Abel Smith is an author, feature writer, documentary maker and podcaster. His latest book is A Hateful Decision: Churchill’s Darkest Hour and the British Attack on the French Navy (Transworld, 2026)
]]> Masters of disinformation: how British spies played dirty in the Cold War https://www.historyextra.com/membership/masters-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-cold-war-podcast/ Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:41:43 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/masters-disinformation-how-british-spies-played-dirty-cold-war-podcast/ Rory Cormac tells the story of the mavericks charged with running a black propaganda campaign to disrupt and discredit Britain's Cold War adversaries They 'haunted' an Indonesian general with a talking ghost and planted fake hippies in a Bulgarian youth festival. But did they change the course of the Cold War? Rory Cormac introduces Spencer Mizen to the comically absurd – and dangerously controversial – tactics deployed by a group of misfits and mavericks charged with raining down confusion on Britain's adversaries in the 1950s and 60s.
Hear more from Rory Cormac on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to him discussing Queen Victoria's spy network here
]]> Churchill's toughest decision https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchills-toughest-decision-podcast/ Wed, 10 Jun 2026 08:09:23 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchills-toughest-decision-podcast/ Edward Abel Smith considers a devastating Royal Navy attack on the French fleet in the summer of 1940, and whether it was justifiable In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy attacked a French fleet moored off the coast of north Africa, killing almost 1300 sailors. Winston Churchill described his decision to green-light the operation as the toughest he ever had to take. But was it the right decision? In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Edward Abel Smith talks to Spencer Mizen about an episode that would shake Britain's wartime relations with both the French and the Americans.
To hear more from Edward Abel Smith, don't miss our podcast episode on the remarkable life of Nicholas Winton, the British Schindler, who helped hundreds of Jewish children escape Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War
]]> Churchill’s evolving perspective on D-Day https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-d-day/ Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:10:54 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-d-day/ Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood discuss the prime minister’s role in one of the major moments of the Second World War D-Day was one of the key episodes in the Second World War. But what did Winston Churchill make of the plans for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France? Was, as some have suggested, the British prime minister really reluctant to get involved? And how fraught were relationships between the Allied leaders?
Speaking to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast, Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood, authors of the book Churchill’s D-Day: The Inside Story, discuss the decisions and tensions behind the operation.
What context do we need to understand about Churchill – and Britain – in the early years of the Second World War to make sense of what was to happen in the run up to D-Day?
Richard Dannatt: The first thing to consider is the circumstances of how Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. He had recently been present at a parliamentary debate to defend a disastrous campaign in Norway that had taken place in the months beforehand. It had been Churchill’s idea to try and hobble German industry by cutting off the supply of iron ore from Sweden through Norway into Germany – and it had been a disaster. Everything you can think of that could go wrong, had gone wrong – and it’s one of the illustrated examples that we use in the British Army staff college about how not to conduct an operation. This – among other things – would continue to play on Churchill’s mind.
- Read more | Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?
Allen Packwood: We must remember that Churchill is not elected prime minister in May 1940. He is there, really, because of a Westminster coup to remove Neville Chamberlain.
Churchill then had to construct a national coalition government, which meant he had to put together a war cabinet containing people who – until recently – had been his rivals or political opponents. This meant he did not enter the war as prime minister in a strong position – and he had to consider carefully how he was going to respond to that.
We then had the Dunkirk evacuation, and Churchill very famously said that wars are not won by evacuations. But it must have been very clear to him – in 1940 – that the road was going to be a very long, hard one before Britain could return to France.
One of the things that has often been said to have influenced Churchill’s approach to D-Day is his experience in the First World War, specifically the Dardanelles campaign (1915–16). Do you think this is overstated?
RD: I think the Dardanelles campaign had a major impact on Churchill. He was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, and he had come up with the campaign’s concept, which was a bold attempt to try and break the deadlock of the extended trench warfare on the Western Front. You must give him marks for trying to find a new initiative, but – and this is the sadness – although the strategic thinking might have been reasonable, the operational delivery was woeful.
There was also a huge loss of life in the Dardanelles campaign. This, in addition to the Norway campaign, sat heavily on Churchill’s mind in the run up to D-Day. I think it played very much into his overall thinking.
AP: The lesson that he took away from Dardanelles was that if you were going to attempt an operation of this scale and complexity then you needed to do it very carefully – and at the right time. You needed to make sure that you had control of all the moving parts, politically and militarily.
We tend to think of Churchill as this bellicose war leader, but actually he was keen to avoid the huge losses of life that had occurred in the First World War. This certainly influenced his strategy and thinking when it came to D-Day.
To what extent is it right to say that Churchill was sceptical of D-Day?
RD: Churchill knew at some stage that there needed to be re-entry into Europe, but he was very keen on it not being premature. So on the one hand, he was sceptical. But on the other hand, he knew it was inevitable. The big thing was to get the timing and preparation right.
AP: This idea of Churchill being sceptical about D-Day developed quite quickly after the end of the Second World War. Eisenhower, when he published his memoirs, described how at one of the big conferences in May 1944, just before D-Day, Churchill had told the gathering that he was hardening on this enterprise, which the Americans immediately took to mean that he had been soft on it up until that point.
This view has been taken up more recently in popular culture by the movie Churchill (2017). The film starts with Churchill walking on a British beach and recoiling as he has a vision of the sea running red with blood. The implication is that history is going to repeat itself; it’s going be the Dardanelles campaign all over again. The movie then proceeds to show Churchill attempting to obstruct the operation with 48 hours to go – which of course was not the case.
- Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero
Churchill was also keenly aware of this idea that he was sceptical of D-Day – and he tried to respond to it in his own war memoirs. The key point is that he always knew we were going to have to go back into France, but he knew it should only be contemplated at the right moment when all the necessary preconditions have been met (so when we had the tactical experience, expertise, strategy and equipment required for what was going to be an incredibly difficult operation).
Do we know what Churchill felt about D-Day in the run up to the day itself?
RD: I think once Churchill had agreed in his own mind that it was going to happen, then he was determined that the operation should be given the best chance of success. He leveraged his convening power as prime minister to make sure that all these different elements were in place – from technical innovations… to planning… to even putting a lockdown in place in the south of England to maintain the security of the operation.
But we know that Churchill had doubts and fears about D-Day. Hence the remark to his wife, Clemmie, the night before, in which he mentioned the possibility of enormous casualties.
AP: Another of Churchill’s big concerns in the weeks running up to D-Day was the risk of French civilian casualties.
The bombing scheme that Eisenhower and the military commanders had settled on was one that targeted the French railway system and marshalling yards. These tended to be in areas of high civilian population density.
Churchill raised this issue multiple times with the defence committee and the war cabinet. He raised it with Eisenhower and President Roosevelt. His fear was that if the French take these very large casualties, then this might turn them against the Allies.
He was also thinking of the political ramifications of this course of action, which are that in the postwar world, this might drive a wedge between Britain and France. Ultimately, of course, he didn’t overrule the military commanders, but he did everything he could to try and limit the effect of that bombing on French civilians.
What did Churchill do on 6 June itself?
AP: Churchill was in Downing Street in the Treasury Annex on the morning of D-Day, poring over the latest maps and charts and receiving the latest reports on what’s happening on the beaches. At 12 noon, he moved to the House of Commons to make his first statement. At that point, there was not much he could say; the operation was still shrouded in the fog of war and it was not clear how it was developing. So Churchill left to have lunch with the king, and then visited some of the headquarters on the outskirts of London before coming back and reporting to parliament. The really interesting fact, of course, is that this was not where Churchill wanted to be at all – he wanted to be in the centre of the action itself and had tried unsuccessfully to get himself on board a British cruiser.
What were the repercussions of D-Day? How did it affect Churchill’s relationship with, for example, the US?
RD: Churchill began to realise – once the operations ashore were fully developed – that this was now the beginning of an inevitable switch from British influence to American influence. This meant that his ability to influence subsequent military strategy and higher-level operational objectives were no longer in his control. It was no longer solely a British operation. It was a realisation that the British position was changing and that the Americans’ position of supremacy was frankly becoming a reality.
Tim Benbow at King’s College London has written that the D-Day landings showed Churchill at his best and at his worst. Is this a view that you have sympathy with?
AP: This is probably a view that I would have some sympathy with.
I think one of the things that Churchill did well – but isn’t often credited for – is the political work that he did behind the scenes in maintaining the national coalition. In the months before D-Day, he spent a lot of time preparing the country for this huge operation using the convening power of the prime minister to knock heads together, to ensure that production targets are met, to ensure that the artificial harbours needed for the operation are being built, to ensure that the right equipment and tanks are in place.
I suppose the worst of Churchill might be a certain sort of selfishness and stubbornness, which was certainly evidenced in his insistence that he wanted to accompany the troops across the channel, even though that was clearly not where he should be. I think he found the months leading up to D-Day personally very difficult because he was one of those people who liked to be at the centre of the action.
I think he also found it difficult to accept the transition to secondary status in the Anglo-American relationship.
How would you like people to understand D-Day and Churchill’s role within it?
RD: I think Churchill’s role in D-Day illustrates most effectively Britain’s role in D-Day and Britain’s role in the new Europe that was created at the end of the Second World War. Let’s face it, if D-Day had failed – and if we had not been able to defeat Nazi Germany and some kind of pact had been formed between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union – Europe would have looked a very different place today.
- Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line
AP: For me, it’s all about complexity and nuance. Too often when we talk about Churchill, we tend to just see that famous image of Churchill as the ‘bulldog warrior’ with his V for Victory salute and a cigar. We think of his speeches. But Churchill was an incredibly complex character; the decisions that he – and others – were taking were incredibly difficult and it’s impossible to know if they got it right. In many of these decisions, there was not one right answer, just some incredibly tough choices.
But I think if you want to understand the world that we inhabit today – and the Europe that we inhabit today – then you must understand the decisions that underpin this and got us to where we are now.
Allen Packwood is director of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College in Cambridge
Richard Dannatt is former Chief of the General Staff and member of the House of Lords
This interview, originally published in 2024, was taken from an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast: D-Day: was Churchill really against the operation?
]]> What are history's biggest misconceptions? 9 experts reveal what we get wrong about the past https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-are-historys-biggest-misconceptions-9-experts-reveal-what-we-get-wrong-about-the-past/ Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:30:41 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/what-are-historys-biggest-misconceptions-9-experts-reveal-what-we-get-wrong-about-the-past/ Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors take aim at the most egregious fallacies about the past Ancient Athenian democracy was democratic
There’s plenty to criticise about that ancient approach
We wouldn’t recognise the system practised in ancient Athens as democracy in the sense we understand it today. Women did not have the vote, and the entire society depended on a massive slave population to be able to function. Yet in other ways it was also more democratic than our democracies today. Every (male) citizen took an active role in governing the city, and every major decision was taken by a vote involving every citizen who attended.
An even more egregious misconception is the idea there is an unbroken link between ancient and modern democracy. Athenian democracy lasted for only around 200 years; since then, through most of the rest of antiquity, the Middle Ages and more modern historical periods, democracy has not been practised.
In more recent times, Athenian democracy has been held up as a system to avoid rather than imitate. During debates between the founding fathers about the Constitution of the United States in the 1780s, many argued that “even if every Athenian had been a Socrates [ie very intelligent], Athenian democracy would have been little more than mob rule”. It is only very recently that we have come (again) to admire Athenian democracy, and want to link our own system of government to that ancient ideal.
Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick
Most people in the past had much shorter lifespans
Many people died very young – but many others lived long lives
On paper, this seems to be true: today, the average global life expectancy is around 72, whereas for much of the medieval and early modern periods the figure hovered around 30–35. You might think, then, that modern medicine, public health initiatives and better nutrition have all combined to help us live longer than our ancestors.
In fact, though there has been a significant improvement in living conditions, the idea that there has been a corresponding increase in lifespan over the centuries is incorrect. The overall life expectancy has risen simply because more of us are living to older ages.
It’s important to understand the difference between life expectancy and lifespan. The former is an average – so, for example, if two people are born on the same day and one lives to the age of 80 but the other gets ill and dies before their first birthday, their average life expectancy is 40. Although that is statistically correct, we should be wary of drawing conclusions about typical lifespans. Using such figures doesn’t tell us that all (or even most) people in the past lived shorter lives.
For most of the medieval and early modern periods, infant mortality was high due to the prevalence of disease, the lack of vaccines and medical knowledge, poor hygiene and sanitation, and complications from childbirth. But if you made it through childhood, you had a fair chance of living for almost as long as the average person today.
There are plenty of historical examples of people living well into their seventies, eighties and beyond. Elizabeth I was in her 70th year when she died, and the Roman author and scientist Pliny the Elder recorded one musician who enjoyed good health until his death at the age of 105.
Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster
Every war ends at a single moment
The consequences of conflict can drag on for years
The greatest historical misconception is that wars come to an end neatly, on a specific date, with the signing of an armistice or surrender agreement. No war in history has ever ended happily-ever-after with a sudden return to normality. The consequences of war – famine, displacement, lawlessness and political violence – often last longer than the conflict itself.
The First World War is a perfect example. In our popular imagination, especially in the west, it came to an abrupt end on 11 November 1918. But the guns did not fall silent for long. Popular revolutions soon broke out in Germany, Austria, Hungary and many other places. Turkey was consumed by ethnic and religious violence, and vast battles took place between Poland, Ukraine and the new Soviet Union. Such events created an atmosphere of chaos that lasted well into the 1920s.
The same thing happened after the Second World War. Ceasefires in 1945 did not bring immediate peace. Instead, armed groups rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the defeat of Germany and Japan. Political violence became the norm, and full-blown civil wars erupted in Greece, Poland, China and Indonesia, among other places. That period of chaos lasted at least until the end of the 1940s.
War is sometimes unavoidable. But if we had a better historical understanding of the long-term consequences, perhaps we would prepare a little better for the period of instability that always comes afterwards. And maybe we would be less eager to embark on war in the first place.
Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)
History is written by the victors
Voices of the defeated often resonate the loudest
“History will be kind to me,” said Winston Churchill, “for I intend to write it.” Or such, at least, is the popular paraphrase of a line that Churchill trotted out on numerous occasions, always in jest. In reality, as he must have appreciated, no one gets to dictate how they are viewed by posterity. Nevertheless, the notion that ‘history is written by the victors’ is a persistent one.
Consider a few counter-examples from the broad sweep of British history. Our only narrative source for Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is Gildas, a British monk lamenting the arrival of the invaders. Similarly, when the Vikings were ravaging Europe in the ninth century, the tale of their bloody progress was recorded by their monastic victims. Even the Normans, who produced an abundance of propaganda to justify their conquest of England in 1066, did not get to control the narrative. One of the most insightful portraits of William the Conqueror is the obituary of him penned by an English monk. The king, we are told, “was stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will… In his time people suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries.”
When Edward I conquered Wales in the late 13th century, no one (insofar as we know) celebrated his victory in verse, but Welsh poets did lament the passing of his vanquished opponent, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The voices of the defeated are often the ones that resonate the loudest across the centuries.
Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster
Vikings drank from their enemies’ skulls
Those horned helmets are hooey, too
Lurid myths swirl around the Vikings: that they wore horned helmets, drank from the skulls of vanquished foes, and tortured and dispatched enemies by splaying their ribs in the gruesome ‘blood eagle’. It’s all nonsense.
We can blame the 19th century for the horned helmets. When translations of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas were published, that headwear started to sneak into the illustrations. Wagner didn’t help. In 1876, for the first performances of his Ring cycle, costume designer Carl Doepler decided that horned helmets would be just the thing.
The idea of drinking from the skulls of enemies comes from a misreading of an Old Norse verse. That’s easily done, because the Norse wrote fiendishly complicated poetry that was deliberately difficult to unpick. One ode, Krákumál (‘The Lay of Kraka’), features a line about heroes drinking from the “curved branches of skulls”. It’s actually a poetic reference to animal horns, but 17th-century antiquarian Ole Worm translated it as heroes quaffing “from the skulls of those they had killed”.
The ‘blood eagle’ is trickier to unpick, but again Old Norse poetry might be the source. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (‘Hairy-Breeches’), it was written, murdered the king of Northumbria by cutting his ribs from his spine and drawing out his lungs so that they looked like gory wings. It has been argued that this is a misunderstanding rooted in knottily obscure Old Norse verse, and that no such form of torture was ever perpetrated.
The moral of the story? If in doubt, blame poets and costume designers.
Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024)
Pompeii was ‘frozen in time’
Most citizens of the Roman town escaped a violent volcanic demise
The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 didn’t happen in an instant. Nor was Pompeii buried in one swift sweep by lava. In fact, there was no lava at all.
On the morning of the eruption, a thin curl of smoke rose from Vesuvius. By midday, the volcano had erupted, sending a vast column of smoke, ash and pumice 16 miles into the sky. Pumice rained onto the surrounding towns, and over the next few hours many of their inhabitants started to flee. Sometime after 7pm, the column – now too heavy to support itself – collapsed. This sent a scorching gush of pumice, gas and ash known as a pyroclastic flow hurtling towards Herculaneum. The city was buried beneath 20 metres of volcanic material. There were no survivors.
It wasn’t until 6.30am the following day that the first pyroclastic surge reached Pompeii’s northern walls, sweeping about 200 metres into the city before losing momentum. Then, between 7.30 and 8am, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again – and Pompeii was engulfed. Any people remaining in the city were killed instantly, their bodies locked in a rigid ‘boxer pose’ as their muscles contracted rapidly in the fierce heat.
Though many died beneath collapsing structures or from suffocation during the first parts of the eruption, most residents escaped before the final lethal surges; the death rate in Pompeii may have been as low as 10 per cent. The eruption didn’t happen in an instant – and the destruction it wreaked took place over the course of some 24 hours.
Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii
The North won the American Civil War
White racial democracy was not displaced even after Confederate defeat
Southern planters lost much when the American Civil War ended in 1865. The North’s victory in that conflict ensured that the Confederacy would never establish a global empire of cotton, and paved the way for emancipation, citizenship for freed people, and the franchise for black American men.
Yet white racial democracy was not displaced, even if the slaveocracy was somewhat diminished. For the remainder of the 19th century, white people mounted deadly battles against black voters, business owners and politicians. They raged against the short-lived experiment in full democracy known as Reconstruction until they struck a deal with the federal government to end it. By 1877, the rest of the country had left black southerners and their few allies to defend democracy alone.
Even more strikingly, white southern elites won a narrative war that changed Americans’ sense of what happened. Historians call it the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’: an understanding shaped in schoolbooks, monuments and popular media that the antebellum South was a place of romance, not horror, and that there was something noble in the region’s last stand. Secessionists were understood as rebels, not traitors, and freed people as, in the words of future president Woodrow Wilson, “dusky children untimely put out of school”.
“Whoever tells the best story wins,” it’s been said. The white South told such a compelling story that they secured Jim Crow segregation by 1900, bringing themselves back into the union on their own terms – and at the expense of black Americans.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University
The Victorians were po-faced prudes
The queen herself loved to laugh
"We are not amused.” These words, supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria, have burdened the 19th century with an unfair reputation for prudishness and humourlessness. Many still characterise the Victorian era as a stiff and solemn time when fun and pleasure were suffocated under a cloud of self-discipline and respectability. This, quite frankly, is nonsense.
Fun was a vital part of Victorian culture. Celebrity comedians packed music halls every night, the country’s most popular newspapers brimmed with jokes, and the saying “laugh and grow fat” – the belief that cheerfulness promoted health – was a familiar household phrase.
Victoria herself was no exception. Her diaries are packed with things that made her laugh. At one dinner party, she found herself talking to an elderly admiral who bored her with a story about a damaged ship. Hoping to change the subject, she asked after his sister’s health. Mishearing her, the admiral replied: “She’ll be fine, ma’am, when we turn her over and scrape the barnacles off her bottom.” Victoria shook with uncontrollable laughter until tears ran down her face.
It’s true that Victorian humour was less coarse than that of earlier generations. Jokes about sex, farts and other bodily functions fell out of favour – in respectable circles, at least – but puns became a national obsession, and the era’s comedians produced plenty of books, cartoons and one-liners that still have the power to amuse.
It’s high time we stopped treating the Victorians as solemn bores, and started laughing with them instead of at them.
Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University
The Middle Ages were dismal
The Renaissance starts here
I am continually astonished by how often I hear the medieval period in Europe called the ‘dark ages’. One thousand years of history cannot be dismissed so quickly. This was a period of seminal political developments – of genuine statecraft. It was a period of architectural and visual glories. It was a period of outstandingly rich intellectual achievement. It encompassed the Carolingian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries; the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, another period of great cultural revival and vibrancy; and the late 14th and 15th-century Renaissance. (Indeed, we can blame those latter Renaissance thinkers for the denigration of the earlier Middle Ages: they had a vested interest in making out their immediate predecessors to have been benighted and stupidly dogmatic.)
Modern intellectual approaches were developed in the 12th century, pioneered by the scholar Peter Abelard in his dialectical text Sic et non (‘Yes and no’). Abelard also wrote a text called the Ethics, which set the tone for many centuries of ethical thinking; he foregrounded the idea of intention, too, and promoted the dictum ‘Know thyself’.
On a more everyday note, the Middle Ages were also not as filthy as often assumed. By the later part of the period, urban authorities in particular were deeply concerned about hygiene, and regulated extensively.
The metaphor “standing on the shoulders of giants” is often attributed to Newton, but he was merely quoting a 12th-century philosopher, Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” We should, like Bernard, acknowledge our intellectual debts to our medieval predecessors.
Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Famous last words: what did Winston Churchill, Walt Disney and Marie Antoinette say on their deathbeds? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/famous-last-words-what-did-winston-churchill-walt-disney-and-marie-antoinette-say-on-their-deathbeds/ Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:30:45 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/famous-last-words-what-did-winston-churchill-walt-disney-and-marie-antoinette-say-on-their-deathbeds/ The parting comments of some of history's most famous figures have been recorded for posterity. Here, Jonny Wilkes reveals a selection of the most noteworthy examples – from dying presidents to condemned prisoners
1. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go”
Oscar Wilde
The Irish author and playwright – best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) – is an enduring source of witty, pithy adages, such as “I can resist everything except temptation” and “always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much”. Oscar Wilde kept that unique brand of humour until the end: on his deathbed, in a Paris hotel room, he reportedly quipped about the dingy wallpaper. Evidently, the wallpaper won the duel, since 46-year-old Wilde passed away of meningitis shortly afterwards, on 30 November 1900.
2. “I’m bored with it all”
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill suffered his eighth stroke on 15 January 1965, after a decade and a half of failing health. All the cigars, booze and rich meals had caught up with him. He had been the prime minister who led Britain through the Second World War with impassioned oratory and declarations of “We shall never surrender”, but, if his last words are anything to go by, his battle was fought. With his son-in-law Christopher Soames by his side, Churchill muttered, “I’m bored with it all,” before slipping into a coma. Nine days later, on 24 January, he died at the age of 90.
3. “What the devil do you mean to sing to me, priest? You are out of tune!”
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Having described music as “the language of the heart”, the French composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau was a major force of the Baroque period of the 18th century, and remained active until his dying day, 12 September 1764. Indeed, the last contribution he made to music was a critique of the quality of religious singing being performed in his room. Perhaps he was already hearing the choirs of angels, and so earthly melodies no longer enthralled him the way that they had during his long career.
4. “Nothing, only ‘love one another’”
William Henry Seward
The death of Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state was also intended on that fateful night in 1865. At the same time that the US president was shot, one of John Wilkes Booth’s fellow conspirators stabbed Seward in the neck and face multiple times. In a bizarre twist of fortune, it was a splint on his jaw, the result of a stagecoach accident several days earlier, that saved his life. His death actually came on 10 October 1872. Sensing the end, his family gathered around and asked if he had any last things to say. His response was simply to “love one another”.
5. “Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose”
Marie Antoinette
King Louis XVI lost his head in the French Revolution and his queen, Marie Antoinette, would follow him to the guillotine. She had become so hated among her people as the epitome of extravagance (that said, she never uttered “let them eat cake”) that all efforts were made to make her execution as humiliating as possible.
On 16 October 1793, she was forced to dress in front of her guards, had her hair chopped off and hands bound behind her back, and was taken through the streets on the back of a cart, jeered all the way. Yet Antoinette maintained her composure, even apologising politely when she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot.
6. “One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes”
Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock is rightly celebrated as one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema, directing dozens of iconic movies like Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho. Dubbed the ‘master of suspense’, he meticulously crafted every scene and knew exactly where the plot was going. His Hitchcockian style and immense talent for storytelling could not be called upon, however, when it came to the grand denouement of his life, as his last words illustrate. He died from kidney failure, aged 80, on 29 April 1980, relying not on plot but his Catholic hopes.
7. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”
John Sedgwick
On the morning of 9 May 1864, John Sedgwick set about inspecting the line at the battle of Spotsylvania Court House. A general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, he had been wounded at Antietam in 1862 but did not share his men’s concerns about Confederate sharpshooters that began to make their presence known. He scolded his staff, stating that the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” – right before being felled by a bullet under his left eye.
8. “How’s this for your headline: French Fries!”
James Donald French
How did murderer James Donald French react as he was taken to the electric chair on 10 August 1966? He made a pun for the press. Far from fearing death, the 30-year-old American had been longing for it for years. Following his first murder in 1958, he requested execution and was disappointed to receive a life sentence. So, in 1961, he strangled his cellmate and again demanded the death penalty. It took three separate trials, and French’s constant pleas not to accept any appeals, before he finally got his wish and went out with a gag.
9. “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man”
Che Guevara
The man from all those posters and T-shirts, Che Guevara became a globally recognised name for his role in putting Fidel Castro in power in Cuba. But it was in a doomed insurgency in Bolivia that the Marxist revolutionary had his final fight. Captured by CIA-backed soldiers, he was held in a mud schoolhouse deep in the jungle when the decision was made to have him executed. When, on 9 October 1967, a soldier entered his rudimentary cell, Guevara barked out his final words before being shot. He may have been only a man, but his face became a ubiquitous and enduring icon of revolution.
10. “I must go in, for the fog is rising”
Emily Dickinson
By the time that Emily Dickinson – little known in her lifetime but now regarded as the influential and ever-popular American poet of the 19th century – died, it is fair to say that her spirit had been broken. In the preceding years, she endured numerous deaths of family and friends, most traumatically her young, favourite nephew, and her health collapsed. “The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me,” she wrote in a letter. Dickinson passed away at 55 on 15 May 1886, shortly after penning one last verse that ended, “I must go in, for the fog is rising”.
11. “Turn me over. I’m done on this side”
Lawrence of Rome
Lawrence served as one of the seven deacons of Rome in the third century; this was not a good time to be a Christian as, in AD 258, Emperor Valerian ordered that the pope and clergy be put to death. According to the legend, Lawrence’s method of execution was being burned alive on a gridiron, similar to cooking meat on a barbecue. Lawrence saw the funny side of this image, it seems, since during his martyrdom he supposedly joked that his tormentors should turn him over to ensure he cooked fully. These last words may be apocryphal, but Lawrence is still honoured as patron saint of comedians.
12. “Kurt Russell”
Walt Disney
After Walt Disney’s death from lung cancer on 15 December 1966, his body was not cryogenically frozen, as the urban myth goes. Yet the death of Mickey Mouse’s creator comes with another oddity: the mystery of his final written note. While the meanings of “Ron Miller”, “Way Down Cellar” and “CIA – Mobley” remain unknown, Disney also wrote the name Kurt Russell (misspelled as “Kirt”). The teen actor had signed a 10-year contract with Disney, and it seems that the ailing businessman wanted to plot out the young star’s next project before the end. Even without it, though, Kurt Russell became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.
13. “Thomas Jefferson survives”
John Adams
On 4 July 1826, exactly 50 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a 90-year-old John Adams lay dying. Three decades earlier, he had been elected as the second president of the United States, and his final thoughts were with the man who succeeded him. Adams’ last reported words were “Thomas Jefferson survives”.
While the two men had fallen out over how their new country should be governed, they renewed their friendship in their later years, so maybe Adams was hopeful at the end that one of the Founding Fathers remained. Unfortunately, he was wrong: Jefferson, aged 83, had actually died just a few hours before Adams.
14. “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn”
Joe DiMaggio
The retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio may have been married to the glamourous movie star Marilyn Monroe for less than a year, but he remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. He took the lead in arranging the funeral after Monroe was found dead in 1962, and for the next 20 years he sent roses to her grave every week. DiMaggio never remarried and as he lay dying on 8 March 1999, aged 84, he clung on to one hope: that he and Monroe would finally be reunited.
15. “Nothing but death”
Jane Austen
The beloved author of Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma died at the age of 41 on 18 July 1817. The cause remains a matter of debate, although it is known that she suffered with pains and illnesses for at least a year, which may explain her last sentiments, expressed by her sister Cassandra in a letter to Austen’s niece, Fanny. “When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death,” it read. These were probably not her final words, however, as Cassandra also refers to Austen saying, “God grant me patience, pray for me, oh, pray for me.”
16. “I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this”
Thomas J Grasso
With his execution by lethal injection scheduled for 20 March 1995, convicted murderer Thomas J Grasso put in a rather elaborate request for his final meal. It included two dozen steamed mussels, two dozen steamed clams, six barbecued spareribs, a Burger King double cheeseburger, a can of SpaghettiOs with meatballs, half a pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and strawberries. He clearly was not fully satisfied, since he wanted his last statement to be a complaint to the chef that he received spaghetti instead of the canned version he asked for.
17. “More weight”
Giles Corey
During the Salem Witch Trials, hundreds were accused of witchcraft in the small Massachusetts village, resulting in 19 hangings, at least five deaths in prison, and one man – a farmer in his 80s named Giles Corey – being pressed to death. Having refused to enter a plea, he was stripped and laid on the floor with a wooden board across his body, on which heavy stones were gradually put on top. The torture lasted days and was expected to end in confession; instead, Corey kept crying out for “more weight”. He finally succumbed on 19 September 1692.
18. “Thanks be to God. I have but lived this day and now I die content”
Horatio Nelson
It is a well-worn story that when Lord Nelson was shot at the battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, he asked of his friend, and flag captain of HMS Victory, “Kiss me, Hardy”. They were not the great admiral’s last words, though. Taken belowdecks, Nelson continued to issue orders and lived long enough to receive word that several French ships had surrendered. Only then did he say, “Thanks be to God. I have but lived this day and now I die content.” After the battle, his body was placed in a cask of brandy to keep it preserved for its voyage back to England.
- Read more | “A monster of egotism”: Dominic Sandbrook reveals the secret to Admiral Nelson’s unstoppable success
19. “I shoot better”
Hannie Schaft
During the Second World War, a young woman named Jannetje Johanna Schaft signed up to fight for the Dutch resistance. To them, she became ‘Hannie’, but to the Nazis, who came to fear her marksmanship, she was ‘the girl with red hair’. After carrying out numerous assassinations, Schaft was finally captured in 1945 and executed just three weeks before the end of the war. Although, according to her legend, she did not go down easily: the first shot only grazed her, leading Schaft to yell out, “I shoot better!” The executioner did not make the same mistake again.
20. “I am just going outside and may be some time”
Lawrence Oates
Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four other men – Dr Edward Wilson, Captain Lawrence Oates, Lieutenant Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Petty Officer Edgar Evans – had set out to be the very first to reach the South Pole, but on reaching it in January 1912 they discovered that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had just beaten them.
Defeated and demoralised, they began the 800-mile trek back to base camp. None of them survived. Oates, suffering from frostbite and gangrene, made the ultimate sacrifice by leaving the tent in a blizzard with the now-immortalised words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” His body was never found.
21. “Now comes the mystery”
Henry Ward Beecher
In life, Henry Ward Beecher was the most famous preacher in the United States: a passionate minister in Congregational Protestantism, a gifted orator, and a social reformer calling for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. His works had a profound influence on American Christianity in the 19th century and beyond. As he faced the end of his mortal life, having suffered a stroke in early March 1887, his last words were filled with the philosophical curiosity and hopefulness that permeated much of his preaching, as he pondered what awaited him: “Now comes the mystery.”
]]> Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-vs-stalin-did-this-one-speech-cause-the-cold-war/ Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:30:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-vs-stalin-did-this-one-speech-cause-the-cold-war/ It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood? “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event.
Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come.
The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding.
Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”.
Strangling Bolshevism
Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia – and even to the USSR – was by no means one of unremitting hostility. And that was reflected in the Fulton speech, too. He was no admirer of tsarist autocracy, and even less so of Soviet communism. But during the First World War he eulogised Britain’s Russian allies, and was distressed when they dropped out of the conflict.
Churchill became the strongest advocate of intervention in the civil war that followed the October Revolution of 1917, and always regretted the failure “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth”. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to see the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Nazi Germany, and even as a possible ally. In a March 1939 interview, he asserted that the USSR had “hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions” behind the recent actions of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. Even after the Soviets and Germans signed a non-aggression pact that August, he appeared to foresee that the USSR’s national interests would eventually force Stalin into an anti-German posture.
His prediction came true with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The functional but troubled Anglo-Soviet alliance that followed provides the crucial backdrop to the breakdown in relations that the Iron Curtain speech signalled.
Churchill continued to view diplomacy through a traditional ‘Great Power’ lens. That is to say, history was made via hard bargains between the paramount countries, recognising each other’s spheres of influence and legitimate interests, and often involving the ruthless sacrifice of weaker peoples and nations.
Churchill’s wartime meetings and correspondence with Stalin were based on this principle – and also on the belief that personal relations were crucial, and that his own individual charm could make a difference. He said in 1942 that he “liked Mr Stalin, liked his jokes and his humour, but could have gotten on with him a lot better if he could have talked with him directly instead of through an interpreter”. Combining tough talk with schmoozing and flattery, he believed that mutual recognition of British and Soviet spheres of interest represented the path to a safer future. The Iron Curtain speech of 1946 reflected the continuation of this approach, rather than a radical shift in outlook.
Falling for Stalin’s charms
Churchill, however, oscillated between optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Soviet behaviour. After the February 1945 Yalta conference – at which the British, Soviet and American leaders discussed the postwar reorganisation of Europe – the prime minister told colleagues: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Yet as the Red Army’s advance progressed, he became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Soviet dominance of Europe. On 12 May, just a few days after VE Day, Churchill wrote to President Truman of the need to reach a concordat with the USSR before the British and American armies ‘melted’ with the onset of peace. “An iron curtain is drawn down between their front,” he added. This was his first rehearsal of a phrase he would later make famous.
Six days later, Churchill lectured the Soviet ambassador, accusing his Kremlin masters of “dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lubeck to Trieste, behind which we had no knowledge of what was happening”. Churchill’s diatribe did not have the desired effect. The ambassador told Moscow that “we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with an adventurer, for whom war is his natural element”. Indeed, Churchill was already pondering ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a military plan – quickly dropped – for a potential military conflict with the Soviets. But at the Potsdam conference of July 1945 (at which the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders convened once more), he was, in the words of foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “under Stalin’s spell again”. Eden reported that Churchill "kept repeating: 'I like that man.'"
Churchill’s participation in the negotiations was about to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end – for, before the Potsdam conference was concluded, news came through that he had been voted out of power in that summer’s general election. Churchill’s shock electoral defeat was a bitter political and personal blow, but it didn’t have a material impact on Anglo-Soviet relations: the new Labour government carried on foreign policy on familiar lines. When parliament reassembled, Churchill made his first public reference to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain”. His words were reported in the press but did not make headlines, and attracted little comment.
It should be noted that Churchill was now speaking in a new context, following the successful test of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though he could not say so openly, he hoped that the American monopoly of the new weapon would be the lever that would keep Soviet ambitions in check. He was thoroughly conscious of Britain’s weakening global strength, and believed that a strong relationship with the US was key to escaping its precarious position.
For this reason, the message he received from Truman that autumn was a godsend. The president passed on an invitation from the head of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to deliver the annual John Findley Green Foundation Lecture on problems of international concern. “This is a wonderful school in my home state,” scribbled Truman on the letter. “Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill, still harbouring designs of returning to Downing Street, now had an opportunity to relaunch himself on the world stage, as well as to take a holiday in the sun.
During his lengthy absence from home at the start of 1946, Churchill sojourned in Florida and Cuba before travelling to Washington, DC. Truman accompanied him to Fulton by train.
As the train approached Missouri, a crisis was unfolding in Persia (now Iran) on the back of a speech by Stalin that seemed to anticipate conflict with the capitalist powers. The Soviets had failed to withdraw all of their troops from the north of Persia by the deadline that had previously been agreed. But though the president was increasingly incensed by their stonewalling stance, he was not yet ready to lay his fears and frustrations in front of his war-weary populace. With no official responsibilities, however, Churchill could speak frankly in a way that those in government could not.
- Read more | How the Cold War made the modern world
The bombshell moment
On 5 March, Churchill delivered his remarks before 2,700 people, all of them white. As one black American newspaper noted, the college was “located in a state where Jim Crow is a legal instrument of government and Negro boys and girls are barred from its portals by law”. The mainstream media made little of this shocking fact, but the message contained within the speech itself was regarded as a bombshell.
Churchill’s oration was 46 minutes and 5,000 words long. The ‘iron curtain’ phrase came at the two-thirds mark. It was part of a broader warning about the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytising tendencies”, which Churchill backed up with claims about Moscow’s search for “totalitarian control” in the countries of central and eastern Europe.
Yet despite the muscular rhetoric, scholars now tend to emphasise that the Iron Curtain speech was not a Cold War clarion call intended to stoke tensions. This is another way in which the speech has been misunderstood. Churchill undoubtedly wanted to reset relations through plain speaking, but he also wanted to show the Soviets that he understood their perspective. Hence he stressed his “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”. He stated that he understood “the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression”. It was necessary, he said, to reach “a good understanding on all points with Russia” under the auspices of the recently formed United Nations.
Over the following days and weeks, few observers paid much heed to the more emollient sentiments in Churchill’s speech. The nuances of the former PM’s words were easily lost in the media tumult. In fact, the forcefulness of his overall message risked exacerbating the problem he was trying to solve.
“Churchill’s speech is sure some blockbuster, as one American paper describes it,” noted one ordinary observer, a female librarian back in Britain. “I read it first in full, and later heard extracts; and I must say that his delivery was so calm and flowing that the parts which had horrified me in print seemed perfectly innocuous as he spoke them.”
Churchill offered not only a diagnosis of the perils of deteriorating east-west relations but also a remedy – and in the US it was the latter that proved especially divisive. He urged that a robust response to the Soviets should be built upon “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”. This seemingly innocuous phrase was widely (and correctly) perceived as a concealed call for a military alliance between the UK and the US.
This lit a fire, because former isolationists still distrusted the British empire, and progressive idealists believed that a bilateral pact would be a threat to the integrity of the UN. Leo Amery, Churchill’s former secretary of state for India and Burma, thought it was an error to link the admonitions about the Soviets and the alliance concept together in one speech. “The Americans are intensely suspicious of any attempt to inveigle them into being mere instruments of British policy in the Old World,” observe Amery. Meanwhile, Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American to represent New York in Congress, claimed that Churchill wanted “an English-speaking dictatorship” and “a form of super-nationalism based on race” that would plunge the world once again into war.
Truman had known of the speech’s contents in advance but, when the political kitchen heated up, denied having done so. Britain’s Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, took refuge in the claim that his government was “not called upon to express any opinion of a speech delivered in another country by a private individual”. However, in private he was less dismissive: “It will certainly have done good if it encourages the Americans to think and to recognise the need for the United States and the British Commonwealth to work together,” he said.
The destiny of the world
It is not clear if Churchill really expected the speech to cause the Soviets to change their attitude – but if so, he failed. “Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation,” Stalin told the Soviet state-mouthpiece, Pravda. “Mr Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.” With fear spreading, Moscow housewives started panic-buying. The Soviet authorities then tried to calm the public, spreading the message that “Stalin’s interview did not mean that war was in sight”.
The Fulton speech may have elicited a frosty reception in Moscow but, within a year, despite the initial misgivings, its once-controversial message had found widespread acceptance in the west. As tensions between America and the Soviet Union ratcheted up further, the 1947 Truman Doctrine committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine is now seen by some historians as marking the true start of the Cold War. To this day, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic pay lip service to the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.
And Churchill was not quite done with the Soviet Union. Prime minister again from 1951–55, he ploughed his remaining strength into a vain quest for a rapprochement with the post-Stalin Kremlin. This was not because he had changed his mind; rather, his quest for détente was of a piece with his longstanding approach to great power relations and his belief in the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. He was convinced that the greatest chance of peace lay in convincing the Soviet government that they were confronted by superior force that would be used ruthlessly against them unless they mended their ways. “Then the communists will make a bargain,” he judged.
East-west relations would have continued declining with or without the Iron Curtain speech. Yet although Churchill did not start the Cold War at Fulton, he selected its defining image – and with carefully crafted vocabulary he created an indelible mental picture that influenced all subsequent debate.
Metal coinage
Was Churchill really the first to use the phrase 'Iron Curtain'?
“Iron curtain: a state of rigid censorship and secrecy (coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the line of demarcation between western Europe and the Soviet zone of influence)”. This was the definition included in the American College Dictionary. But the editors remained uncertain – had Churchill genuinely originated the term? In 1951, a member of that publication’s team wrote to him to find out.
There were good reasons for wondering. The metaphor is based not on conventional domestic drapes but on the fire safety curtains used in theatres. In a 1904 novel, Churchill’s friend HG Wells (pictured) described how, when a character is deprived of his freedom, “an iron curtain… dropped between him and the outer world”. The historian Patrick Wright credits the writer Vernon Lee (a pseudonym for Violet Paget) as being the first to deploy the term in an international relations context. She wrote of “war’s monstrous iron curtain” dividing the two sides after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.
After the October 1917 revolution, the phrase was used in a new sense. In her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden described her arrival in Petrograd as part of a Labour delegation: “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!”
It is more than possible that Churchill was acquainted with these examples. But, if so, the influence was unconscious. In response to the query about the origins of his words, he replied: “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before – though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theatre.” The dictionary definition stood.
The fact that Churchill saw ‘iron curtain’ as a standard expression may explain why he did not do more to attract attention to it. The official title of his speech was ‘The Sinews of Peace’. This, in turn, offers a clue as to why the famous phrase didn’t dominate newspaper headlines. The Daily Express, for example, ran with “CHURCHILL URGES EMPIRE ‘ALLIANCE’ WITH U.S”. The first BBC reporting, on the 11pm radio news, omitted the ‘iron curtain’ passage altogether.
Churchill was a genius with words. But even he did not know which of his own would be best remembered.
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Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is co-host of the podcast Churchill: The Finest Half Hour
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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