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Section Five Further Enhancement
I Text II
1. Lead-in Question
Churchill was a successful politician, orator, and writer, but had he always been successful? What are some unsuccessful aspects of Churchill as a human being?
2. Text II
WINSTON CHURCHILL1
John Keegan2
1 Churchill came of a military dynasty. His ancestor John Churchill had been created first
Duke3 of Marlborough in 1702 for his victories against Louis XIV4 early in the War of the Spanish Succession5. Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the house built by the nation for Marlborough6. As a young man of undistinguished academic accomplishment — he was admitted to Sandhurst after two failed attempts — he entered the army as a cavalry officer. He took enthusiastically to soldiering (and perhaps even more enthusiastically to regimental polo playing) and between 1895 and 1898 managed to see three campaigns: Spain’s struggle in Cuba7 in 1895, the North-West Frontier campaign in India8 in 1897 and the Sudan campaign9 of 1898, where he took part in what is often described as the British Army’s last cavalry charge, at Omdurman. In Cuba he was present as a war correspondent, and in India and the Sudan he was present both as a war correspondent and as a serving officer. Thus he revealed two other aspects of his character: a literary bent and an interest in public affairs.
2 He was to write all his life. His Life of Marlborough is one of the great English
biographies, and The History of the Second World War helped win him a Nobel Prize for literature. Writing, however, never fully engaged his energies. Politics consumed him. His father Lord Randolph Churchill was a brilliant political failure. Early in life, Winston determined to succeed where his father had failed. His motives were twofold. His father had despised him. Writing in August 1893 to Winston’s grandmother, the dowager10 Duchess11 of Marlborough, he said the boy lacked \for settled work. He has a great talent for show-off, exaggeration and make-believe.\His disapproval surely stung, but Churchill reacted by venerating his father’s memory. Winston fought to restore his father’s honour in Parliament (where it had been dented by the Conservative Party). Thirty years after Lord Randolph’s death, Winston wrote, \my dreams of comradeship were ended. There remained for me only to pursue his aims and vindicate his memory.\
3 Churchill entered Parliament in 1901 at age 26. In 1904 he left the Conservative Party
to join the Liberals, in part out of calculation: the Liberals were the coming party, and in its ranks he soon achieved high office. He became Home Secretary in 1910 and First Lord of the Admiralty12 in 1911. Thus it was as political head of the Royal Navy at the outbreak of
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the First World War in 1914 that he stepped onto the world stage.
4 A passionate believer in the navy’s historic strategic role, he immediately committed
the Royal Naval Division to an intervention in the Flanders campaign in 1914. Frustrated by the stalemate in Belgium and France that followed, he initiated the Allies’ only major effort to outflank the Germans on the Western Front by sending the navy, and later a large force of the army, to the Mediterranean. At Gallipoli in 1915, this Anglo-French force struggled to break the defenses that blocked access to the Black Sea. It was a heroic failure that forced Churchill’s resignation and led to his political eclipse.
5 It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. Despite his readmission to office in 1917,
after a spell commanding an infantry battalion on the Western Front, he failed to re-establish the reputation as a future national statesman he had won before the war. Dispirited, he chose the issue of the Liberal Party’s support for the first government formed by the Labour Party in 1924 to rejoin the Conservatives, after a spell when he had been out of Parliament altogether. The Conservative Prime Minister appointed Churchill Chancellor of the Exchequer, but when he returned the country to the gold standard, it proved financially disastrous, and he further weakened his political position by opposing measures to grant India limited self-government. He resigned office in 1931 and entered what appeared to be a terminal political decline.
6 By espousing anti-Nazi policies in his wilderness years between 1933 and 1939, he
ensured that when the moment of final confrontation between Britain and Hitler came in 1940, he stood out as the one man in whom the nation could place its trust. He had decried the prewar appeasement policies of the Conservative leaders Baldwin and Chamberlain13. When Chamberlain lost the confidence of Parliament, Churchill was installed in the premiership.
7 His was a bleak inheritance. Following the total defeat of France, Britain truly, in his
words, \German invasion and under constant German air attack. He nevertheless refused Hitler’s offers of peace, organized a successful air defense that led to the victory of the Battle of Britain and meanwhile sent most of what remained of the British army, after its escape from the humiliation of Dunkirk14, to the Middle East to oppose Hitler’s Italian ally, Mussolini. 8 This was one of the boldest strategic decisions in history. Convinced that Hitler could
not invade Britain while the Royal Navy and its protecting Royal Air Force remained intact, he dispatched the army to a remote theater of war to open a second front against the Nazi alliance. Its victories against Mussolini during 1940 – 41 both humiliated and infuriated Hitler, while its intervention in Greece, to oppose Hitler’s invasion of the Balkans, disrupted the Nazi dictator’s plans to conclude German conquests in Europe by defeating Russia. 9 From the outset of his premiership, Churchill, half American by birth, had rested his
hope of ultimate victory in U.S. intervention. He had established a personal relationship with President Roosevelt that he hoped would flower into a war-winning alliance. Roosevelt’s reluctance to commit the U.S. beyond an association \his optimism. He always hoped events would work his way. The decision by Japan, Hitler’s ally, to attack the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, justified his hopes. That evening he confided to himself, \
10 America’s entry into the Second World War marked the high point of Churchill’s
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statesmanship. Britain, demographically, industrially and financially, had entered the war weaker than either of its eventual allies, the Soviet Union and the U.S. Defeats in 1940 had weakened it further, as had the liquidation of its international investments to fund its early war efforts. During 1942, the prestige Britain had won as Hitler’s only enemy allowed Churchill to sustain parity of leadership in the anti-Nazi alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin. 11 Churchill understandably exulted in the success of the D-day15 invasion when it came in
1944. By then it was the Russo-American rather than the Anglo-American nexus, however, that dominated the alliance, as he ruefully recognized at the last Big Three conference in February 1945. Shortly afterward he suffered the domestic humiliation of losing the general election and with it the premiership. He was to return to power in 1951 and remain until April 1955, when ill health and visibly failing powers caused him to resign.
12 It would have been kinder to his reputation had he not returned. He was not an
effective peacetime Prime Minister. His name had been made, and he stood unchallengeable, as the greatest of all Britain’s war leaders. It was not only his own country, though, that owed him a debt. So too did the world of free men and women to whom he had made a constant and inclusive appeal in his magnificent speeches from embattled Britain in 1940 and 1941.
Notes
1. About the text — It is an abridged version of the article with the same title from www.time.com/time/time 100/leaders/profile/churchill.html. 2. About the author — John Keegan, a historian, is the defense and military specialist for London’s Daily Telegraph.
3. duke (Paragraph 1) — the title of a nobleman of the highest rank
4. Louis XIV (Paragraph 1) — (1638 – 1715) son of Louis XIII, King of France from 1643 to 1715 5. War of Spanish Succession (Paragraph 1) — (1701 – 1714) a war caused by the efforts of King Louis XIV to extend French power. The direct cause of the war was that the poor health of the childless King Charles II left the issue of succession open to the claims of three principal pretenders including Louis XIV.
6. Marlborough (Paragraph 1) — a place in England
7. Spain’s struggle in Cuba (Paragraph 1) — In the early 19th century, Spain lost control of most American colonies to the revolutionaries and in the war of 1898 lost Cuba to the U.S.
8. the North-West Frontier campaign in India (Paragraph 1) — A civil war broke out in Chitral, India in 1896 and it was suppressed by the British expedition in 1897.
9. the Sudan campaign (Paragraph 1) — The Sudan was conquered by Egypt in 1821, and in 1882 England occupied Egypt and then in 1898 took over the Sudan from Egypt so as to prevent France from taking the upper reaches of the Nile.
10. dowager (Paragraph 2) — a woman who holds some title or property from her husband 11. duchess (Paragraph 2) — the title of a woman equal in rank to a duke
12. Admiralty (Paragraph 3) — the government department which controls the navy
13. Chamberlain (Paragraph 6) — Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940), a conservative politician and Prime-Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940.
14. Dunkirk (Paragraph 7) — a seaport in the north of France, from which Allied troops evacuated
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at the end of May and beginning of June, 1940, before the German troops arrived
15. D-day (Paragraph 11) — the day during the World War II when the Allies began their invasion of Europe by attacking the coast of North France
Additional notes
1. … the Liberals were the coming party ... (Paragraph 3) — ... the Liberal Party was the party
most likely to grow in strength and to hold power ...
2. It was effectively to last nearly 25 years. (Paragraph 5) — “It” refers to what is said in the last
sentence of Paragraph 4 — Churchill’s resignation and his political eclipse. Winston Churchill disappeared from politics in 1914 and didn’t regain his reputation until the outbreak of war in 1939.
3. It would have been kinder to his reputation had he not returned. (Paragraph 12) — If he had
not returned to power in 1951, he would have had a better reputation / his reputation would not have been so diminished.
Questions for discussion
1. What was Churchill interested in when he was in India and the Sudan? 2. What kind of Nobel Prize did Churchill win?
3. When and how did Churchill step onto the world stage?
4. Why did Churchill hope the U.S. could join the war against Hitler? 5. What helped Churchill to be as important as Roosevelt and Stalin?
6. In what way, according to the author of this text, was Churchill a successful statesman?
Key to Questions for discussion
1. He was interested in both literature and public affairs when he was in India and the Sudan. 2. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
3. He stepped onto the world stage at the outbreak of the World War I in 1914 in the capacity of First Lord of the Admiralty of Great Britain.
4. Because he knew very well that his country alone was not demographically, industrially or financially strong enough to win the war against the Nazis and the intervention of the U.S., the most powerful country in the world, would bring the war to its end much sooner.
5. It was the fact that Britain, under the leadership of Churchill, stood alone as Hitler’s only enemy in 1942.
6. Ever since he became the premier of his country, Churchill placed his hope of the final victory on the intervention of the U.S. In order to get the U.S. involved in the war, he established a personal relationship with President Roosevelt. When his request was declined by Roosevelt, he was still optimistic and believed that things would work his way. The later development of the world situation proved that he was right.
II MEMORABLE QUOTES
Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.
— John Adams
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
— Thomas Paine
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John Adams (1735 – 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat and political theorist. As a leading champion of independence in 1776, he was the second President of the United States (1797 – 1801).
Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809) was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Questions for Discussion:
1) Do you think one should love one’s country? Share your opinion of patriotism with your
classmates.
2) Share with your classmates a story of a patriotic person.
Guidance
1) Suggestion: Patriotism can be represented differently in different historical stages, e.g. in
wartime, in times of peace. No matter what period one is in, having a full knowledge of one’s country (being patriotic but not chauvinistic) and serving for the country when one is most needed are always recommendable.
2) For example: Deng Jiaxian returned to the poor and war-stricken China from the well-off
America in 1950 and dedicated himself to the dangerous and arduous research work of atomic bomb. He sacrificed his life for the cause and died of radiation-caused cancer, without whose efforts, China would not have gained its current position.
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