Finest Hour Summer 2018

Winston Churchill was a professionally trained army officer. It would have been surprising if he had started out as anything else. From boyhood, he was fascinated by military history and deeply proud of his descent from one of Britain’s greatest generals, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. Identifying these traits in his son, Lord Randolph Churchill steered him in the direction of the army. The rest is history. Major General P. A. E. Nanson, the present Commandant of The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, begins this issue for us reflecting on the impact his institution had on Gentleman Cadet Winston Churchill. Douglas Russell then surveys Churchill’s army career in peace and war—a period that lasted nearly thirty years and was not without danger. Churchill also had long experience with the army in…

Email: info@winstonchurchill.org Tweet: @ChurchillCentre WHAT’S IN A NAME? HAMPSHIRE—I am pleased that this issue is about Churchill’s long association with the British Army. From experience, I know that there is understandable confusion as to the name of the institution where Churchill received his training as an officer and believe it will be helpful to sort this out for readers. Originally there were two separate institutions for training Army officers: the Royal Military Academy (RMA) at Woolwich (for “technical” branches, viz. Artillery, Engineers, and later Signals); and the Royal Military College (RMC) at Sandhurst (largely for Cavalry and Infantry). Churchill attended this second institution in 1893–95. In 1947 the RMA and RMC were amalgamated (at the former RMC premises) to create The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS). A lot of former RMA “furniture” and other property…

Winston S. Churchill in his memoir My Early Life famously wrote, “Twenty to twenty-five, those are the years.” Indeed, those were years of great adventure and real achievement for the young lieutenant of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. During those years from 1895 to 1900, Churchill saw combat in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa, was mentioned in dispatches and recommended for a decoration, earned four campaign medals and the Spanish Order of Military Merit, wrote five books, established himself as a popular war correspondent and lecturer, gained international fame as an escaped prisoner of war, and was elected to a seat in Parliament, all before his twenty-sixth birthday. Churchill was interested in things military from a young age. His earliest surviving letter, written at age seven, is about toy soldiers,…

1. Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life, A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 74. 2. Ibid. pp. 33–34. 3. Martin Gilbert, In Search of Churchill (London: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 215. 4. My Early Life, p. 90. 5. Archivo General Militar, Sergovia, Spain, Seccion I, Legajo E–1344. 6. Churchill’s account of this campaign is The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898). 7. The London Gazette, 11 January 1898, p. 151. 8. My Early Life, p. 182. 9. Randolph S. Churchill, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume I, Part 2, 1896–1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 974. 10. Winston S. Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899). 11. Churchill published two books based on his newspaper dispatches…

Historians commonly represent Winston Churchill’s relationship with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig as antagonistic. Churchill was one of the British government’s most outspoken proponents of an “eastern” strategy during the First World War, urging operations against the junior members of the Central Powers. Haig’s own views on strategy, on the other hand, were resolutely orthodox. A committed “westerner,” the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) believed that victory could only be achieved through offensives against the main force of the German army in France, and he was suspicious at best of any diversion of resources and manpower to subsidiary theaters. Churchill and Haig’s disagreements over such fundamental issues made the two men obvious opponents in wartime debates as well as the controversies that persisted long after the war had ended.…

1. Daniel Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005), p. 90. 2. Martin Gilbert, ed., Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume III, Part 2, May 1915–December 1916 (London: Heinemann, 1972), pp. 1334–35. 3. Ibid., p. 335 and p. 1196. 4. Gary Sheffield and J. M. Bourne, eds., Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914–18 (London: Phoenix, 2006), pp. 216–17. 5. David R. Woodward, ed., The Military Correspondence of Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918, (London: Bodley Head, 1989), p. 79. 6. Gilbert, p. 1574. 7. “Politicians and Casualties: Hands off the Army!” The Daily Mail, 13 October 13 1916. 8. Charles à Court Repington, The First World War, Volume I, 1914–1918, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), p. 517. 9. John Charteris, At G. H. Q. (London: Cassell, 1931),…