Context: Cometh the time cometh the man, blubbing

War hero or mass murderer? Context is everything.

Jan 18, 2023

The Simpsons: Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part 2 (1995); https://frinkiac.com/caption/S07E01/514730

A fictional German plane’s fatal encounter with Grampa Simpson calls to mind a real example of context’s supremacy, that staple of leadership books, Winston Churchill.

If you’re just about to pass on yet another story about Churchill, read on. He is the point of departure, not the point of the story. Love him or loathe him – and he lived such an active political life it is possible to do both – in 1940 Churchill led the free world when all he could manage was a retreat.

The new job

How is this for a first day on the job? It is May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill, age sixty-five, has finally won his dream job, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In other news, that morning Adolf Hitler launched an attack that, in six weeks, will leave him, in Churchill’s words, “sprawled across Europe” and what is left of Britain’s small army and France’s big army will be trapped in Hitler’s maw.

Churchill is PM only because Lord Halifax turned down the job. The Cabinet is split. Halifax wants to explore a deal with Hitler. The world believes Britain will go under in a matter of weeks and many Britons agree. Americans watch from the sidelines. Some admire Hitler, others simply want to avoid another European war, and others would help but fear that American weapons will be turned against them once Britain is overrun. Instead of sending arms, President Roosevelt suggests Britain send its powerful navy to Canada so it doesn’t fall into German hands.

Leading by the ears

There is a saying about the Second World War, that is unfair in detail and accurate in thrust: “Russia gave the blood. America gave the money, and Churchill gave the speeches.”1 In the month following his appointment Churchill will give three speeches that we believe today immediately inspired the free world. Initially they receive mixed reviews.

The first, the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech, is delivered in the House of Commons on the 13th of May. It is only about seven minutes long but includes this:

… We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be…

Churchill delivers the second speech, this time over the BBC, Sunday evening 19th of May. He is preparing the public for defeat and possible capture of the Army in France:

We must expect …the bulk of that hideous apparatus of aggression which gashed Holland into ruin and slavery in a few days will be turned upon us. I am sure I speak for all when I say we are ready to face it; to endure it; and to retaliate against it…

The speech Is soberly received by the public. It might have seemed less magisterial had people seen Sir Tyrone Guthrie gripping Churchill’s ears from behind as he delivered it2.

Churchill’s third and best remembered speech, delivered 4 June 1940 in the House of Commons, is actually his report on the evacuation from Dunkirk.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…

As he says, wars are not won by retreats but message is clear, Britain will fight3.

Fighting words

It has been said that “Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” His speeches were inspirational but inspiration without clarification is a flash of lightening on a dark night. It can as easily blind as illuminate. Churchill illuminates a landscape that is confusing and frightening, and brings clarity and purpose. The speeches are, like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, economical, yet the listener sees a path forward in compelling terms.

What they do is far more important than inspire.

Leadership is the credible communication or validation of an idea. Following leaders is, literally and figuratively, about the expected direction of travel.

The singer matters more than the song and the melody matters more than the lyrics. In a compelling speech, singer, song, and lyrics combine to engender emotion; the message feels true and the direction of travel right and righteous. That is only possible when the listener trusts in the speaker’s emotional commitment. “We shall never surrender” intoned by Neville Chamberlain, the reedy former PM, who in 1938 promised “peace in our time”, would have occasioned gallows humour at best.

Churchill credibly communicates the fundamental idea that Britain will not surrender because he is already well known for his belligerence, tenacity, and bravery – to his reputational cost in less desperate times then and now.

Churchill was a gifted orator because he’d studied rhetoric, given countless speeches, and because he was emotional – too emotional in the judgment of many of his colleagues. “I blub a lot” he said, and he did. The decision never to surrender, when cooler heads wanted to explore options, was emotional. But calculation had put Britain in this position. Resolve requires emotion. That Churchill’s emotion sprang from a sentimental belief in the British Empire that repeatedly put him on the wrong side of so many issues was, with Hitler just across the Channel, suddenly a strength.

Churchill looks and sounds like a bulldog but sustaining credibility requires hard evidence. He is not long providing it.

Shelling friends and influencing people

With the defeat of France, Britain, as he says, “falls back on her old ally, the Sea”. If you are on an island the sea is a moat or a noose depending on who controls it. Less than two weeks after the fall of France he orders the Royal Navy to destroy France’s navy in port to prevent it falling into German hands.

In the years before the Second World War democracy seemed disorganized and decadent. Its economic twin, free market capitalism, had brought the world to its knees and Hitler to power. The question in many minds was not whether democracy would swoon but into whose arms, Stalin’s or Hitler’s. After France surrendered in July, the answer seemed obvious. Slaughtering 8000 French sailors, erstwhile and potential allies, is condemned as barbaric by friend and foe alike. But the world sees that Britain will do anything to defeat Hitler.

A death worse than fate

Applying the three great, all-purpose questions to the context we find that, at the critical moment in 1940, the first two had been, at least for the foreseeable future, definitively answered:

“What?”, Hitler dominates Europe and plans to invade Britain.
“So what?”, Nazi domination is bad.
“Now what?”, We shall soon surrender, has become “we shall never surrender”.

Churchill changes the one element of context over which he has some control and he changes it for everyone.

People believe him and make different decisions - not least Hitler and Roosevelt - but ordinary people too because, worse than dying in a war is dying in a war just before your side quits. With that doubt resolved, airmen fight against long odds; soldiers re-arm; sailors brave U-boats; and a Lancashire housewife confides to her diary,

If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Mr. Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.4

Context über alles.

This sounds like a conventional ode to heroic leadership, but Winston Churchill’s finest hour is a bit of misdirection on my part. My purpose is not to argue the “great man theory of history”. Quite the opposite. It is to demonstrate the authority of context over the greats. No war, no Great Churchill. True, he’d had a successful career as a writer and a meteoric rise and fall as a politician but it was the Second World War that made him the towering example of leadership he remains today.

Context made his qualities attractive to followers. The proof came immediately after the war when the grateful electorate tossed him.5