319 Winston Is Back!

The History of the Twentieth Century

Mark Painter

History

4.8 • 719 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the final year before the war began, Winston Churchill's denunciations of Nazi Germany began to seem prescient, but Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain fiercely resisted calls to invite Churchill into the Cabinet until war came. Then Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, for the second time in his career.

Transcript

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0:00.0	According to Joseph Stalin, he held a conversation in 1931 with Lady Astor, the first woman to be seated in the British Parliament,
0:29.0	in which he asked her about various politicians in the UK. Neville Chamberlain? The coming man, she said.
0:38.0	What about Winston Churchill?
0:40.7	Oh, he's finished, she assured him.
0:44.3	Stalin replied,
0:45.7	If your country is ever in trouble, he will come back.
0:50.7	Welcome to the history of the 20th century.
0:54.2	Music Episode 319, Winston is back.
1:33.4	I invite you to think back for a moment to November of 1938.
1:39.5	Neville Chamberlain's diplomacy had led to the Munich Agreement, which was at first hailed as a breakthrough for peace.
1:47.0	Then came Kristallnacht, and suddenly making peace with Adolf Hitler didn't seem like such a good idea after all.
1:55.4	In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill was pressing for his fellow conservative backbenchers to break with
2:02.1	the Chamberlain government and support an amendment offered by the Liberal Party, which would
2:07.5	have created a ministry of supply, rather like the Ministry of Munitions that had helped organize
2:13.7	the British war effort in 1915, a move aimed at better preparing Britain for war.
2:20.8	In Churchill's view, the Munich Agreement had bought Britain time to rearm, albeit time purchased
2:27.0	at hideous cost, as he put it. Neville Chamberlain responded by questioning Churchill's judgment.
2:36.0	Churchill told his fellow backbenchers that this was not a party question.
2:40.1	It was an issue affecting the safety of the nation.
2:43.7	He was able to persuade exactly two Tory MPs besides himself to defect.
2:50.0	One of them was Harold McMillan.
2:53.0	The amendment failed. In the weeks that followed, Churchill celebrated his 64th birthday,
	...

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