April 9, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Winston Churchill earned his reputation on the battlefield long before he became the man who led Britain through the darkest days of World War II. He dodged bullets, willingly put himself in harm’s way time and again, and even escaped from a prison camp far from British shores. Churchill understood the brutal realities of war—and he despised it. Churchill scholar and Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn tells the story of how that hard-won understanding shaped Britain’s stand against Nazi tyranny.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.
Most people remember Winston Churchill for his steady leadership during
World War Two. That steady leadership came from years of
experience in and around war. You are to tell the
story of how Churchill interacted with conflict is doctor Larry
p arn president of Hillsdale College. Let's get into the story.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
He didn't like war. He was really good at it.
You know, he fought. First time he fought was in Afghanistan.
He walks up and down upright behind the rocks. It's
fought up in the rocks by the hills. And so
he'd walk up and down so they could shoot at him.
(00:55):
So they would write about him, writing back the reports
and the dispenses. They call it about the and so
they got used to that, so they didn't mention his
name anymore. So he bought a horse and rode that
up and down. And then the next place he fights
is in the Sedan and he's in a cavalry charge,
last big one, and people talk about him about what
(01:17):
he was like on a battlefield. Then the biggest thing,
the best thing was he went to South Africa and
they'd made a rule that you couldn't write articles for
the press if you were a serving officer, And they
made that rule for him because he was the most
famous commentator on all of the wars he was in
(01:38):
and became a public figure, including talking bad about the generals.
And he was a second lieutenant, and so what he
would do then is he would resign his commission and
serve and write articles for a while, and then he'd
joined back up and served some more. And at the
moment he gets on this armored train and he knows
it's a bad idea. He'd been on the dang thing before.
(02:00):
Think about it for a minute. An armored train is
a stupid idea because they're very heavily armored and stuff,
but you know exactly where they're going, and they got
to have the tracks. And so he said, well, I
don't know, and this guy Haulding and says, please come
with me. I want you to come. So he gets
on the dang train and it's attacked and it's derailed,
(02:21):
and he's a journalist, right, and they're all cowering and
there's hills on both sides and rocks and people behind it,
and there's small arms fire and artillery fire. They were
thirteen killed, and everybody's in a panic. And so he
gets out and he walks the circle out in the
(02:42):
open around the locomotive, you know, and investigated bullets coming down,
you know, and he doesn't notice them. God did not
make such a force as eye merely to stop a bullet.
Churchill was confident, and so he comes and opens the
door and he says, wait, we can get this thing going.
(03:06):
They work for an hour. He's the one that works
out in the open, and they get the train going right,
and then you know what he says when it's over,
He says to hall Dane. He's eventually captured by the way.
He could have got away, but he didn't want to
leave the other guys behind. And of course he escapes
by the way and becomes a national hero and gets
(03:26):
elected to parliament. But on the scene he says to
Captain Haldane, thank you for letting me do that. Isn't
that weird? He said, the whole Derbyshire Light Infantry has
seen that, and now I'm going to be elected to parliament.
He was a fighter, his spirit rose in the face
(03:49):
of war, but he hated it too. Then he's a
politician and then a big war comes the First World War,
and you know, people mistrusted Winston Churchill, and one of
the reasons is they trusted him to tell the truth.
And he was very ambitious and very quick, and that
(04:13):
meant that they were always afraid that no matter what
he got his mits on, he was going to take
it over. And that's because he did. He just couldn't
be stopped. But at the beginning of both world wars,
one of them, Herbert Asquith, is the Prime Minister and
the other Nevill Chamberlain is the Prime Minister. Within three
(04:34):
months of the war broken out, they made him the
chairman of the Committee to coordinate the whole war, because
he had energy and he knew what to do. John Colville,
one of the best witnesses for Churchill, was a chamberlain
guy in the Prime Minister's office. When Churchill took Chamberlain's
(04:55):
place in May of nineteen forty up to diary, it
was illegal, this is a violation of the Official Secrets Act.
But he kept keeping his diary. And it's good that
he did because here's what he thought. They're chamberlain people.
He's steady. Churchill's a wild man. This is going to
(05:17):
be terrible, and then two weeks later he's writing, Oh,
this is how you fight a war. Church was good
at it. He loved it, and he hated it when
the wars broke out. He every time a big one
(05:38):
broke out, he had foreseen it, and he'd spent at
least a decade trying to stop it and failed. Where
did that come from? In eighteen ninety eight, Churchill is
on a battlefield in the Sudan and he sees a
charge and I think this is the earliest instance I
can see of it underman's down on them, and really
(06:02):
the first, one of the first for sure. Islamic republics
had taken the city of Khartoon, which is a thousand
miles down the Nile from Alexandria where the mouth is
up in the Mediterranean, and this Mahdi of Alah was
his title. He took the city and he publicly beheaded
a man named General Gordon, a figure of the Empire
(06:24):
and a heroic man. And they sent evidence of it
to London, and they said, we got to go get them.
They couldn't go by boat. The Nile is impassable for
much of its length, so they sent a camel corps
and it got chopped to pieces. And so then they
employed an engineering kind of general named Kitchener, with whom
Churchill had many dealings, much of them unhappy, and Kitchener
(06:49):
figured out how to do it. They put a whole
bunch of stuff on boats, and they floated them down
to the place where the nile was impassable, and then
they took the stuff off, and what it was was
a railway, and they built a railway. Then they put
all the boats and all the troops and all the
equipment on the locomotives on the trains, and they took
them down to the place. Then they put it all
back on the boats. And now they've got a major
(07:11):
army with gunboats outside cartoon and thirty five thousand dervishes charge.
The one that got the farthest got within one hundred
yards one hundred and fifty yards a football field and
a half. They could hardly see the British lines. And
the British didn't lose thirty people, and they killed twenty
(07:35):
percent of the dervishes. He says. The white flags, that's
the front line. Trips carrying big white flags of the
dervises come over the hill. They have no sense of
the impending tragedy. They were most inferior in artillery, and
so they opened with that. He describes the bullet shearing
(07:59):
through muscle and bone, and the sand and the sweat
and the blood and the screaming. The infantry back at
the British lines fired steadily and stolidly. Although they were
interested in the work. It became tedious after each looked
down the sites. There were fewer targets than the one before.
(08:20):
Then they say that soon the barrels began to melt,
and they had to bring water jackets and keep changing them,
and they had to bring more. There's a factory for killing.
And he never calls the British brave. He calls the dervishes.
And you know, Churchill didn't like these dervishes, but at
the time of the battle only they are brave. And
(08:42):
then he reflects to himself. He says, used to be
bravery was the chief asset in war? Is it machinery?
Now that's a hack of a reflection for somebody twenty
six years old.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
The heck of a reflection. Indeed, those lines by doctor Arne.
Churchill was a fighter. His spirit rose in the face
of war but he hated it too. And this is
the essence of Churchill rising at the time when England
needed him to rise. When we come back, more of
(09:19):
Churchill in battle, Churchill in conflict, and I mean real
life war in battle. Here on our American stories. And
we returned to our American stories and our story.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
On Winston Churchill and war.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
When we last left off, Doctor Larry p arn, president
of Hillsdale College, was telling us that although Winston Churchill
hated war, he was very good at it and had
a profound understanding of it even as a young man.
Was also a great writer. Here's doctor on on one
of the observations Churchill made about war. Let's return to
(10:08):
the store.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
What he wrote was, if you're forever at war, then
that disturbs the liberal society. The liberal society is where
we get to be important dist ordinary people. But if
everything is conscripted, as it must be, he says, the
way war is going, then there will be no room
for any of us to be free. And that means
(10:31):
that's got to be stopped. You got to find a
way to win, and win fast, and not fight if
you can help it. He was always, you know, in
nineteen fifty four, Winston Churchill refused Dwight Eisenhower to go
to Vietnam with him. So what I'm describing here is
(10:52):
an entire life of a man who's a fighter and
is good at it and loves it, and tries to
stop it on the argument that we must spare ourselves
so we can live like free people. And when you
(11:12):
see Hitler coming, do you see why he understood him.
He urgently sets about the job getting the country to
rearm because we're in a position to stop him without
a fight, and we've got to do that. And remember this,
We can only see Churchill after he became the greatest
man in the world and did the greatest things he did.
(11:35):
But of course, most of his life is not like that.
Most of his life is him being the most reluctant
guy to call on his people to sacrifice their way
of life. But then nineteen forty comes and in some
kind of poetic and ironic cosmic justice, he's the one
(11:59):
picked fight the war. But now the Germans have beaten
the French, and the Germans are an alliance with the Russians,
and we are distant, and so then, of course, as
the France is collapsing, and he's flying back and forth
begging the France to stay in the war. And you know,
(12:21):
he's picked Prime Minister because that's a piece of hard medicine,
and at last they're ready to take it. And so
he goes over there and he begs them, and they
quit anyway, having a treaty not to do it, and
so he destroys their fleet in the port of Iran
in North Africa, and he won't send him any more airplanes,
(12:48):
and then France falls anyway, and so then Edward Halifax,
Edward wood Lord Halifax is the Foreign Minister, and he's
the chief of the appeasers, along with Chamberlain, and he
brings a proposal conveyed through Mussolini, Hitler's henchman, not yet
in the war, and says, we want to talk peace
will be really generous, and I want you to see,
(13:12):
this is a dramatic demonstration of what life demands of us.
And we'll never know until heaven whether we were right
or not. I'll explain why, because this guy who's the
one who's trying to stop this war from happening, he's
the only one who doesn't want to open a peace
(13:33):
conference and The reason is it'll be in the papers
and then the whole war effort, a Britain, pitiful thing
that it is, will collapse. And he's the prime minister.
But they don't vote in the cabinet. They have a
discussion and the Prime Minister has the authority to summarize
what they've decided and if you don't like it, you quit.
And so if he says we're going to fight on
(13:58):
and Halifax says I it, the government falls, he doesn't
have the power and so he had to do something
more questionable than vote. He had to talk him into it.
It's amazing that he did. He talks for an hour.
He didn't have time to write the speech out, which
(14:20):
is very uncommon. Two people took notes and we have
the notes. He described the war situation in blank terms.
We're going to be up against overwhelming odds. There's going
to be a naval battle, remember we still have a navy,
but that will go the way of an air battle.
And they have more airplanes, but they have to fight
(14:40):
over here on our side. We don't know how that's
going to go, but there's good hope. And then you know,
if they land the towns, they're going to take first,
have names like names in New England, and the Americans
will come and help us. That's the hope. Remember we're
(15:01):
the hope. At this point, he's familiar with the workings
of the Great World War like no one else. He's
as familiar with that as I am familiar with the
operations of this college. That's infinitely larger. Right, But he
can just think about it and see it, and he
(15:21):
can see gonna need us. I'm gonna have to talk
him into coming. But meanwhile I got a hold on right.
And he closes the speech with this, and I'm asking
you to remember the last person to say this. He says,
I've been thinking in these last few days whether it
is part of my duty to open negotiations with that man.
(15:45):
And I believe that if I were for a moment
to consider parley or surrender, every one of you would
rise up and tear me down from my place. If
this Island story is to end, at last, let it
end when each of us was choking in his own blood.
(16:05):
He talked him into that. They leaped up and patted
him on the back, and for the rest of his life,
friend and enemy still had the same friends and enemies.
They treated him like the greatest man in the world.
And my point is you can't be sure that was
the right thing, because you know what Britain lost. That's
(16:27):
what costs Britain. It's greatness. That's a factual point. And
Churchill himself had made the case a million times we
can't do that. And it's not like he just said,
I'm the Prime Minister, you gotta do it. He had
to summon from himself a speech that there's no living
person he's responsible for that. And then of course he
(16:54):
watched it collapse and become a little country. They were
having to borrow money from us to get food after
the Second World War, the greatest nation on earth for
two hundred years. He hated that, but you know what
the choice was, because when it gets to the end,
and you can only make decisions like this when there's
no alternative. This is what Churchill teaches us about war.
(17:17):
They're two final points. The first one is if you
get to the place where you're going to surrender your
power to resist to the worst man in history, better
to die. There are Frenchmen who have ancestors who signed
(17:41):
orders to round up Jews because otherwise their families would
be shot better to die. That's the first lesson. You
don't make extreme judgments except extreme circumstances, and then pray
(18:04):
for the strength to make them. But the second was,
do you know what this proved to Churchill? It's the
greatest thing of all. It's what he lived his life
to prove. His whole life. He conceived it. He thought,
these things are getting so big, war and production and
nations and science that people don't matter anymore. And sure enough,
(18:29):
the doctrine of Hitler and the doctrine of Stalin is
precisely that people don't matter anymore. Throw up your hands.
You have to be on the side of history or
else everything is vain. But he's talking about choice. What
do chance and choice have to do with each other?
Are they opposites? Are the same? He says, you know
(18:54):
your own life is dominated by accidents. Means you see
that the stuff we do is significant. And he says,
along these pathways, that's where you can see quote the
profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men.
(19:19):
And Churchill was searching for that all his life. And
that means on the twenty eighth of May, when he
walked in that room. He was the only one who
could have done that. He thought God put him there.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
And you've been listening to doctor Larry Arne, president of
Hillsdale College, tell one heck of a story about perhaps
the most important man of the twentieth century. If you're
forever at war, there was no room for anyone to
be free. And it took a warrior to understand the
consequences of war. And as doctor Aran said, the sublime
(19:58):
responsibility of choosing. And by the way, doctor Arne may
be the only one who could have done what he
just did. Sir Martin Gilbert has passed the story behind
the story of Churchill the Warrior here on our American
Stories
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.
Most people remember Winston Churchill for his steady leadership during
World War Two. That steady leadership came from years of
experience in and around war. You are to tell the
story of how Churchill interacted with conflict is doctor Larry
p arn president of Hillsdale College. Let's get into the story.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
He didn't like war. He was really good at it.
You know, he fought. First time he fought was in Afghanistan.
He walks up and down upright behind the rocks. It's
fought up in the rocks by the hills. And so
he'd walk up and down so they could shoot at him.
(00:55):
So they would write about him, writing back the reports
and the dispenses. They call it about the and so
they got used to that, so they didn't mention his
name anymore. So he bought a horse and rode that
up and down. And then the next place he fights
is in the Sedan and he's in a cavalry charge,
last big one, and people talk about him about what
(01:17):
he was like on a battlefield. Then the biggest thing,
the best thing was he went to South Africa and
they'd made a rule that you couldn't write articles for
the press if you were a serving officer, And they
made that rule for him because he was the most
famous commentator on all of the wars he was in
(01:38):
and became a public figure, including talking bad about the generals.
And he was a second lieutenant, and so what he
would do then is he would resign his commission and
serve and write articles for a while, and then he'd
joined back up and served some more. And at the
moment he gets on this armored train and he knows
it's a bad idea. He'd been on the dang thing before.
(02:00):
Think about it for a minute. An armored train is
a stupid idea because they're very heavily armored and stuff,
but you know exactly where they're going, and they got
to have the tracks. And so he said, well, I
don't know, and this guy Haulding and says, please come
with me. I want you to come. So he gets
on the dang train and it's attacked and it's derailed,
(02:21):
and he's a journalist, right, and they're all cowering and
there's hills on both sides and rocks and people behind it,
and there's small arms fire and artillery fire. They were
thirteen killed, and everybody's in a panic. And so he
gets out and he walks the circle out in the
(02:42):
open around the locomotive, you know, and investigated bullets coming down,
you know, and he doesn't notice them. God did not
make such a force as eye merely to stop a bullet.
Churchill was confident, and so he comes and opens the
door and he says, wait, we can get this thing going.
(03:06):
They work for an hour. He's the one that works
out in the open, and they get the train going right,
and then you know what he says when it's over,
He says to hall Dane. He's eventually captured by the way.
He could have got away, but he didn't want to
leave the other guys behind. And of course he escapes
by the way and becomes a national hero and gets
(03:26):
elected to parliament. But on the scene he says to
Captain Haldane, thank you for letting me do that. Isn't
that weird? He said, the whole Derbyshire Light Infantry has
seen that, and now I'm going to be elected to parliament.
He was a fighter, his spirit rose in the face
(03:49):
of war, but he hated it too. Then he's a
politician and then a big war comes the First World War,
and you know, people mistrusted Winston Churchill, and one of
the reasons is they trusted him to tell the truth.
And he was very ambitious and very quick, and that
(04:13):
meant that they were always afraid that no matter what
he got his mits on, he was going to take
it over. And that's because he did. He just couldn't
be stopped. But at the beginning of both world wars,
one of them, Herbert Asquith, is the Prime Minister and
the other Nevill Chamberlain is the Prime Minister. Within three
(04:34):
months of the war broken out, they made him the
chairman of the Committee to coordinate the whole war, because
he had energy and he knew what to do. John Colville,
one of the best witnesses for Churchill, was a chamberlain
guy in the Prime Minister's office. When Churchill took Chamberlain's
(04:55):
place in May of nineteen forty up to diary, it
was illegal, this is a violation of the Official Secrets Act.
But he kept keeping his diary. And it's good that
he did because here's what he thought. They're chamberlain people.
He's steady. Churchill's a wild man. This is going to
(05:17):
be terrible, and then two weeks later he's writing, Oh,
this is how you fight a war. Church was good
at it. He loved it, and he hated it when
the wars broke out. He every time a big one
(05:38):
broke out, he had foreseen it, and he'd spent at
least a decade trying to stop it and failed. Where
did that come from? In eighteen ninety eight, Churchill is
on a battlefield in the Sudan and he sees a
charge and I think this is the earliest instance I
can see of it underman's down on them, and really
(06:02):
the first, one of the first for sure. Islamic republics
had taken the city of Khartoon, which is a thousand
miles down the Nile from Alexandria where the mouth is
up in the Mediterranean, and this Mahdi of Alah was
his title. He took the city and he publicly beheaded
a man named General Gordon, a figure of the Empire
(06:24):
and a heroic man. And they sent evidence of it
to London, and they said, we got to go get them.
They couldn't go by boat. The Nile is impassable for
much of its length, so they sent a camel corps
and it got chopped to pieces. And so then they
employed an engineering kind of general named Kitchener, with whom
Churchill had many dealings, much of them unhappy, and Kitchener
(06:49):
figured out how to do it. They put a whole
bunch of stuff on boats, and they floated them down
to the place where the nile was impassable, and then
they took the stuff off, and what it was was
a railway, and they built a railway. Then they put
all the boats and all the troops and all the
equipment on the locomotives on the trains, and they took
them down to the place. Then they put it all
back on the boats. And now they've got a major
(07:11):
army with gunboats outside cartoon and thirty five thousand dervishes charge.
The one that got the farthest got within one hundred
yards one hundred and fifty yards a football field and
a half. They could hardly see the British lines. And
the British didn't lose thirty people, and they killed twenty
(07:35):
percent of the dervishes. He says. The white flags, that's
the front line. Trips carrying big white flags of the
dervises come over the hill. They have no sense of
the impending tragedy. They were most inferior in artillery, and
so they opened with that. He describes the bullet shearing
(07:59):
through muscle and bone, and the sand and the sweat
and the blood and the screaming. The infantry back at
the British lines fired steadily and stolidly. Although they were
interested in the work. It became tedious after each looked
down the sites. There were fewer targets than the one before.
(08:20):
Then they say that soon the barrels began to melt,
and they had to bring water jackets and keep changing them,
and they had to bring more. There's a factory for killing.
And he never calls the British brave. He calls the dervishes.
And you know, Churchill didn't like these dervishes, but at
the time of the battle only they are brave. And
(08:42):
then he reflects to himself. He says, used to be
bravery was the chief asset in war? Is it machinery?
Now that's a hack of a reflection for somebody twenty
six years old.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
The heck of a reflection. Indeed, those lines by doctor Arne.
Churchill was a fighter. His spirit rose in the face
of war but he hated it too. And this is
the essence of Churchill rising at the time when England
needed him to rise. When we come back, more of
(09:19):
Churchill in battle, Churchill in conflict, and I mean real
life war in battle. Here on our American stories. And
we returned to our American stories and our story.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
On Winston Churchill and war.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
When we last left off, Doctor Larry p arn, president
of Hillsdale College, was telling us that although Winston Churchill
hated war, he was very good at it and had
a profound understanding of it even as a young man.
Was also a great writer. Here's doctor on on one
of the observations Churchill made about war. Let's return to
(10:08):
the store.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
What he wrote was, if you're forever at war, then
that disturbs the liberal society. The liberal society is where
we get to be important dist ordinary people. But if
everything is conscripted, as it must be, he says, the
way war is going, then there will be no room
for any of us to be free. And that means
(10:31):
that's got to be stopped. You got to find a
way to win, and win fast, and not fight if
you can help it. He was always, you know, in
nineteen fifty four, Winston Churchill refused Dwight Eisenhower to go
to Vietnam with him. So what I'm describing here is
(10:52):
an entire life of a man who's a fighter and
is good at it and loves it, and tries to
stop it on the argument that we must spare ourselves
so we can live like free people. And when you
(11:12):
see Hitler coming, do you see why he understood him.
He urgently sets about the job getting the country to
rearm because we're in a position to stop him without
a fight, and we've got to do that. And remember this,
We can only see Churchill after he became the greatest
man in the world and did the greatest things he did.
(11:35):
But of course, most of his life is not like that.
Most of his life is him being the most reluctant
guy to call on his people to sacrifice their way
of life. But then nineteen forty comes and in some
kind of poetic and ironic cosmic justice, he's the one
(11:59):
picked fight the war. But now the Germans have beaten
the French, and the Germans are an alliance with the Russians,
and we are distant, and so then, of course, as
the France is collapsing, and he's flying back and forth
begging the France to stay in the war. And you know,
(12:21):
he's picked Prime Minister because that's a piece of hard medicine,
and at last they're ready to take it. And so
he goes over there and he begs them, and they
quit anyway, having a treaty not to do it, and
so he destroys their fleet in the port of Iran
in North Africa, and he won't send him any more airplanes,
(12:48):
and then France falls anyway, and so then Edward Halifax,
Edward wood Lord Halifax is the Foreign Minister, and he's
the chief of the appeasers, along with Chamberlain, and he
brings a proposal conveyed through Mussolini, Hitler's henchman, not yet
in the war, and says, we want to talk peace
will be really generous, and I want you to see,
(13:12):
this is a dramatic demonstration of what life demands of us.
And we'll never know until heaven whether we were right
or not. I'll explain why, because this guy who's the
one who's trying to stop this war from happening, he's
the only one who doesn't want to open a peace
(13:33):
conference and The reason is it'll be in the papers
and then the whole war effort, a Britain, pitiful thing
that it is, will collapse. And he's the prime minister.
But they don't vote in the cabinet. They have a
discussion and the Prime Minister has the authority to summarize
what they've decided and if you don't like it, you quit.
And so if he says we're going to fight on
(13:58):
and Halifax says I it, the government falls, he doesn't
have the power and so he had to do something
more questionable than vote. He had to talk him into it.
It's amazing that he did. He talks for an hour.
He didn't have time to write the speech out, which
(14:20):
is very uncommon. Two people took notes and we have
the notes. He described the war situation in blank terms.
We're going to be up against overwhelming odds. There's going
to be a naval battle, remember we still have a navy,
but that will go the way of an air battle.
And they have more airplanes, but they have to fight
(14:40):
over here on our side. We don't know how that's
going to go, but there's good hope. And then you know,
if they land the towns, they're going to take first,
have names like names in New England, and the Americans
will come and help us. That's the hope. Remember we're
(15:01):
the hope. At this point, he's familiar with the workings
of the Great World War like no one else. He's
as familiar with that as I am familiar with the
operations of this college. That's infinitely larger. Right, But he
can just think about it and see it, and he
(15:21):
can see gonna need us. I'm gonna have to talk
him into coming. But meanwhile I got a hold on right.
And he closes the speech with this, and I'm asking
you to remember the last person to say this. He says,
I've been thinking in these last few days whether it
is part of my duty to open negotiations with that man.
(15:45):
And I believe that if I were for a moment
to consider parley or surrender, every one of you would
rise up and tear me down from my place. If
this Island story is to end, at last, let it
end when each of us was choking in his own blood.
(16:05):
He talked him into that. They leaped up and patted
him on the back, and for the rest of his life,
friend and enemy still had the same friends and enemies.
They treated him like the greatest man in the world.
And my point is you can't be sure that was
the right thing, because you know what Britain lost. That's
(16:27):
what costs Britain. It's greatness. That's a factual point. And
Churchill himself had made the case a million times we
can't do that. And it's not like he just said,
I'm the Prime Minister, you gotta do it. He had
to summon from himself a speech that there's no living
person he's responsible for that. And then of course he
(16:54):
watched it collapse and become a little country. They were
having to borrow money from us to get food after
the Second World War, the greatest nation on earth for
two hundred years. He hated that, but you know what
the choice was, because when it gets to the end,
and you can only make decisions like this when there's
no alternative. This is what Churchill teaches us about war.
(17:17):
They're two final points. The first one is if you
get to the place where you're going to surrender your
power to resist to the worst man in history, better
to die. There are Frenchmen who have ancestors who signed
(17:41):
orders to round up Jews because otherwise their families would
be shot better to die. That's the first lesson. You
don't make extreme judgments except extreme circumstances, and then pray
(18:04):
for the strength to make them. But the second was,
do you know what this proved to Churchill? It's the
greatest thing of all. It's what he lived his life
to prove. His whole life. He conceived it. He thought,
these things are getting so big, war and production and
nations and science that people don't matter anymore. And sure enough,
(18:29):
the doctrine of Hitler and the doctrine of Stalin is
precisely that people don't matter anymore. Throw up your hands.
You have to be on the side of history or
else everything is vain. But he's talking about choice. What
do chance and choice have to do with each other?
Are they opposites? Are the same? He says, you know
(18:54):
your own life is dominated by accidents. Means you see
that the stuff we do is significant. And he says,
along these pathways, that's where you can see quote the
profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men.
(19:19):
And Churchill was searching for that all his life. And
that means on the twenty eighth of May, when he
walked in that room. He was the only one who
could have done that. He thought God put him there.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
And you've been listening to doctor Larry Arne, president of
Hillsdale College, tell one heck of a story about perhaps
the most important man of the twentieth century. If you're
forever at war, there was no room for anyone to
be free. And it took a warrior to understand the
consequences of war. And as doctor Aran said, the sublime
(19:58):
responsibility of choosing. And by the way, doctor Arne may
be the only one who could have done what he
just did. Sir Martin Gilbert has passed the story behind
the story of Churchill the Warrior here on our American
Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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