Churchill Dies: War Leader's Legacy Ends

Winston Churchill was voted out of office in July 1945, before World War II was even officially over. The man who had rallied Britain through the Blitz, who had given the speeches about fighting on the beaches, who had held the alliance together through sheer force of personality, was gone. Replaced by Clement Attlee's Labour government while Churchill was at Potsdam negotiating the postwar order with Truman and Stalin. He flew home to find he was no longer prime minister. Born at Blenheim Palace on November 30, 1874, Churchill was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome, an American socialite. He was a mediocre student at Harrow, graduated from Sandhurst, saw combat in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa, and wrote about all of it. His early career was defined by ambition, self-promotion, and a willingness to switch political parties when it suited him. He spent most of the 1930s as a political outcast, warning about the rise of Hitler when most of the British establishment preferred appeasement. He was right. When Neville Chamberlain's government collapsed in May 1940, Churchill became prime minister at 65, leading a coalition government through the most dangerous period in British history. His first three months in office coincided with the fall of France, the evacuation at Dunkirk, and the beginning of the German bombing campaign. His speeches during this period, "We shall fight on the beaches," "Their finest hour," "Never in the field of human conflict," were not just rhetoric. They functioned as national infrastructure. A population bracing for invasion needed to hear that resistance was possible, and Churchill's voice, broadcast on the BBC, provided that. He came back as Prime Minister again in 1951, at 76, already declining. He suffered a stroke in 1953 that was hidden from the public. He resigned in 1955. He died on January 24, 1965, exactly 70 years after his father's death. The state funeral lasted three days. Three hundred thousand people filed past his coffin. The cranes along the Thames dipped their jibs in salute as his funeral barge passed.