Finest Hour Summer 2017

Churchill and the Royal Navy A professional army officer by training, Winston Churchill became forever linked with the Royal Navy as a result of his service as First Lord of the Admiralty in the early months of both world wars. This service Churchill himself immortalized in his many Second World War messages to President Roosevelt, where the Prime Minister referred to himself as a “Former Naval Person.” When the guns of August sounded in 1914, Churchill had already been on the job at the Admiralty for three years. During the pre-war years, he had to contend with what was known as the “New Navalism,” which W. Mark Hamilton shows was a commitment to the principles of Alfred Thayer Mahan: developing and maintaining powerful modern navies. But Churchill also found time to improve…

No Rush! TORONTO—While the hugely successful play The Audience and equally successful TV Series The Crown deserve praise, both conclude that Winston Churchill delayed the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to take pressure from the forces which were endeavouring to force him to resign—on the basis that a change of Prime Minister during the period from accession to coronation would not be acceptable. In the productions, Queen Elizabeth points out to Churchill that the coronation of her father King George VI took place just six months after he acceded to the throne. What should have been pointed out, however, was that arrangements for the coronation had commenced some nine months before, for the intended crowning of King Edward VIII. To illustrate that the timing from accession to coronation of Queen Elizabeth…

At the start of his parliamentary career in 1901, Winston Churchill promoted the old Victorian themes of “peace, retrenchment, and reform,” but at the conclusion of his first decade as an MP, he was a champion of what was known as “New Navalism” and a vocal advocate of a greatly enlarged Royal Navy. At mid-decade, he had changed his party political affiliation from Conservative to Liberal. The Royal Navy for centuries had been a central fabric in British life, with a glorious and long history. In the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the Senior Service found itself threatened by rival naval powers, which it had never experienced in a global supremacy lasting a hundred years. In 1914, the British Navy was almost as sacred as the Crown—and just as…

Before the outbreak of war in 1914, it was not as a warrior or as a war leader but as a radical liberal reformer that Churchill was best known. First as President of the Board of Trade, where he had introduced labour exchanges, and then as Home Secretary, in which office he had regulated conditions in the coal mines, Churchill had cemented a political reputation based upon tangible measures designed to improve the lives of working people. As such, he was arguably, alongside fellow radical David Lloyd George, one of the main architects of the social security system that prefigured the welfare state. Did the reform activities for which he was best known continue with his appointment to the Admiralty? Many historians would say not. Malcolm Hill, for example, ends his…

On 7 August 1914, under safe cover of British cruisers and naval aircraft, the Admiralty set about the massive task of transporting the British Expeditionary Force across the English Channel to France. Between then and 27 August, the Royal Navy, without the loss of a man or damage to the ships, safely deployed 120,000 men plus supplies, transport, weapons, munitions, and other equipment across the Channel. It had been a wonderful operation on a scale previously undreamed of, and it had been conducted in such secrecy that the German Supreme Command confidently told its mobile army headquarters in Belgium that no landing of British troops on a large scale had yet taken place. This was on the eve of the first British shot on the continent, near Mons, on 22…

From October 1911 to May 1915 Winston Churchill served as First Lord of the Admiralty—the Royal Navy’s political chief—during which time he proposed a number of imaginative strategic schemes, of which the Dardanelles is by far the most famous. But more central to his strategic thought were his amphibious schemes, which ultimately constituted a grand strategy based on the idea of using Britain’s predominance at sea to defeat Germany. This was a goal he would continue to pursue long after he left the Admiralty. Brainstorming There was nothing novel in this concept; the Royal Navy’s strategists had long argued that amphibious attacks on Germany should be Britain’s main contribution to a continental war. In particular, they looked to the Baltic Sea, where British control would cut Germany off from vital shipments of…