A luncheon meeting of Northern California Churchillians will be held at Lara’s Fine Dining, 1900 Esplanade Drive, Richmond, California, starting at 11am. This wonderful location is far from the untidiness of SF and right on the water. It is next to the Rosie the Riveter Museum and the former Kaiser World War II manufacturing site, which attendees may wish to visit after our event.

Richard Langworth, Churchill historian and Senior Fellow of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, will speak and answer questions on “Churchill and Palestine, 1917-1948.” The nearby Kaiser factory is a happy coincidence: Richard’s first book, Kaiser-Frazer: Last Onslaught on Detroit, began with Henry Kaiser building Liberty and Victory ships during the Second World War. (See “Kaiser-Frazer and the Making of Automotive History.”)

How to register

We will hold a social hour at 11 am followed by lunch at noon and the discussion at 1pm. If you wish to attend, please mail a check for $60 per person (made out to CBTB or “Churchillians by the Bay”) attending to Gregory B. Smith, 154 W. Spain St, Villa T, Sonoma, CA 95476. Be sure to include your menu choice of chicken, salmon, or ravioli from this menu. We hope to see you there for this important event. —Gregory B. Smith, Chairman, Churchillians by the Bay, telephone: (707) 974-9324, churchilliansbythebay@gmail.com.

Churchill and Palestine

Richard will review Churchill’s involvement with Palestine and Israel from the 1917 Balfour Declaration and 1921 Cairo Conference through the “Two-State Solutions” of 1937, 1938 and 1947, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. Churchill’s views and comments will be discussed.

Churchill and Palestine had a long association, spanning two world wars and thirty years. It began when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour declared Britain’s support for a “Jewish National Home” in Palestine. Almost simultaneously, T.E. Lawrence was promising the Arabs sovereignty over Middle Eastern lands ruled for nearly half a millennium by the Turks. In return, Jews and Arabs fought with the Allies in the First World War. A reluctant Britain accepted responsibility for the Mandate of Palestine after the war. East Palestine, 6/7ths of the Mandate, became Arab-ruled Jordan. West Palestine, a tiny sliver the size of Massachusetts, became the source of conflict that has now lasted over a century.

“You deal with it”

Churchill and Palestine were thrown together because Turkey was on the wrong side in the First World War. By its end, the former Ottoman Empire was a shambles. Revolutions and conspiracies were suspected among Arabs, Bolsheviks, Jews and recidivist Turks. The only significant military force left was a British army of about one million. No other power was present in force.

“At this truly horrendous moment,” wrote the historian David Fromkin, “Prime Minister Lloyd George in effect turned to his Colonial Secretary Churchill and said, ‘You deal with it.’”

Churchill expanded his Middle East department with some of the most capable people, including T.E. Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell. They convened in Cairo with Arab and Jewish delegates to redraw the borders of the expired Turkish empire.

Remember that for Britain at least, despite what you may have heard, oil was not the objective. Churchill had secured the Royal Navy’s oil by founding the Anglo-Persian Oil Company before the war. It later became known as BP. It was suspected that Iraq had oil; but Britain had no need for it, and France did not begin thinking about oil until later.

Chapter 1…

The 1921 Cairo Conference created the same Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon that are there today. The French received League of Nations “mandates” over the last two. The British were handed Iraq and Palestine—east and west. In Iraq and East Palestine (Jordan), the conference placed Arab kings—Hashemites, who were not indigenous. This marked Chapter 1 in the story of Churchill and Palestine.

A frequent question is: Why did Churchill put foreign kings in charge of Iraq and Jordan? David Fromkin replied:

Because, in the world in which Churchill grew up, that’s what you did. When it was decided, just before the First World War, to create an independent state of Albania, an intrinsic part of the thing was to find it a king. In the Middle East in 1921, the same thinking applied.

Remember, the Ottoman Empire had no nationality. It was a Turkish-speaking Muslim empire. It was very difficult to establish ethnicity and loyalty since it was only based on religion. Thus, any Muslim government was pretty much acceptable to people of the area.

The scene was now set for generations of strife….

More on Churchill and Palestine

“When Did Churchill Become a Zionist?” 2022.

“Q&A: Churchill at the Stroke of a Pen, Jordan and the Indian Army,” 2021.

“Churchill and Lawrence; A Conjunction of Two Bright Stars,” 2020.

“Avaricious Imperialists or Nation Builders? The Middle East, 100 Years On,” 2020.

“A Century Ago, the Modern Middle East Was Born,” announced The New York Times in December. A colleague asks: “Are you not struck by how difficult (impossible?) it is to encapsulate history in an op-ed? Is that really how and when the modern Middle East was born?”

Good questions. The Times’s idea is that after World War I, avaricious imperialists moved in to enslave Turkey’s former slaves. This familiar theme will dominate through the centenary of the Cairo Conference in March 2021. It’s been around at least since 2001, when Osama bin Laden referred to 9/11 as payback for what he then called “eighty years of injustice.”

Herewith some contrarian, revisionist and politically incorrect thoughts. Among the World War I victors, only France among the Western allies saw much worth having in the defeated Ottoman Empire. Great Britain, by contrast, saw little there for colony-grabbing. One theory is that Britain wanted Iraqi oil. But Britain had had an independent oil supply since 1913. That was when the Admiralty, under Winston Churchill, purchased controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. (Churchill needed to supply his new oil-fired Royal Navy, free from reliance on Standard Oil or Royal Dutch Shell.)

In the Middle East, Britain found herself playing referee between contentious factions.  The situation militated against a peaceful outcome. Appropriately, David Fromkin entitled his book on the subject A Peace to End all Peace. Churchill at the time saw a Middle East “stocked with peppery, pugnacious, proud politicians and theologians, who happen to be at the same time extremely well armed and extremely hard up.”

Sykes, Picot…and Sazonov

Frequently cited in the standard critique of Western avarice is the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916. This allocated British control of Palestine (including today’s Jordan and Israel), southern Iraq, and Mediterranean ports of Haifa and Acre. France would get southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Along came Sergei Sazonov, Czar Nicholas II’s foreign minister. Russia, third member of the Triple Entente, demanded Western Armenia, Constantinople (now Istanbul) and the Dardanelles. The last two had already been promised to the Czar in a 1915 agreement.

Now all this sounds like—and was—power politics of the worst sort. The Entente negotiators paid no attention to the wishes of native populaces. And “Sykes-Picot” (always omitting “Sazonov”) is still a rallying cry for critics of the West.

The problem is that Sykes-Picot was pure wishful thinking. It occurred when nobody knew who would win the war or dictate the peace. It was obsolete almost from the moment of signing. Moreso when the Czar abdicated in 1917, and Soviet Russia left the war in March 1918.

* * *

Prime Minister Lloyd George believed Sykes-Picot was “a fatuous arrangement judged from any and every point of view.” It was inexplicable, he wrote later, “that a man of Sir Mark Sykes’s fine intelligence should ever have appended his signature.” Sykes himself preferred France “to clear out of the whole Arab region except the Lebanon.” He urged soothing the Arabs by giving them a Mediterranean port. The French refused to waive any of their “rights” in the region. Sykes also fervently believed in Jewish-Arab friendship, and on that ground alone wanted the Agreement to go away. The French remained adamant, and the British Foreign Office refused to consider the Arabs capable of self-government. (See Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 344-45.)

Enter Churchill

David Stafford never wrote a bad book. His Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill, sheds light on subsequent events. (Review upcoming by the Hillsdale College Churchill Project). Churchill became Colonial Secretary in February 1921. Among his first challenges was remaking the Middle East. It was now five years since the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Britain, if not France, recognized the principle of self-determination. During the Peace negotiations it was part of President Wilson‘s Fourteen Points. In Europe, new states were born in the Baltic and Balkans. Why not the Middle East?

In March, Churchill convened a conference in Cairo to create nations from the Ottoman corpse. His Pan-Arabist advisors, Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, urged installing Arab Hashemite kings in Jordan and Iraq. Britain took on a League of Nations “Mandate” in the rest of Palestine (what is now Israel) with desultory guarantees to maintain an Arab majority there. France continued to exert its claims for Syria and Lebanon.

By summer, Palestine arrangements threatened to fall apart. Chaim Weizmann’s Zionists demanded that Britain allow a Jewish majority in its Palestine Mandate. This, they said accurately, had been promised in 1917 by the Balfour Declaration. Next came a delegation of Arab Christians and Muslims, demanding repeal of the Balfour Declaration. Both sides resisted all offers of compromise. Churchill was by nature an optimist, but now he seemed to despair. Stafford writes:

He confessed to the Cabinet that the situation in Palestine was causing him “perplexity and anxiety. The whole country is in ferment,” he lamented, “both Arabs and Jews are arming, ready to spring at each other’s throats.’”He could barely conceal his exasperation with the Palestinian demands. “I do not think things are going to get better, but rather worse,” he told the Cabinet.”

Upshot

The deals made at Cairo lasted a remarkably long time, given its ramshackle hodgepodge of compromises. The French proclaimed republics in Lebanon and Syria, but more or less ran those places until France fell in 1940. In 1946 the two became independent. That part of Palestine governed by Abdullah, the British-installed king (Jordan), survives to this day, with his descendant on the throne. The other part became Israel in 1948, when Britain gave up its Mandate and Arabs rejected a UN plan of partition.

In Iraq, Churchill concluded that the only affordable way to maintain order was air power. He advocated dropping tear gas on recalcitrant tribes—and is forever blamed for wishing to gas them to death. But to do that the RAF needed King Faisal’s permission, hardly necessary were he just a puppet. He’d been “elected” by a 90% vote, though he was an outsider. The British Iraq Mandate ended in 1932 by terms of the Anglo-Iraq Treaty. This allowed for British oil interests which had grown more important than they were in 1921.

I remember asking Professor Fromkin, at a Churchill seminar, why the Cairo Conference installed non-native kings in Jordan and Iraq. “Because,” he replied, “in 1921, that was what you did. With all the rival allegiances, an outside king with no history on any side would tend to unify the multiple populations.” Read: it seemed a good idea at the time.

* * *

Who then made the modern Middle East: avaricious imperialists or idealistic nation-builders? Some, but not all of the above. Reading deeply into the works of Fromkin and Stafford, one realizes just how difficult a job it was.

Churchill, for one, does not come off as an empire-builder. Frustrated, he tried to please all sides. In September 1922 he wrote Lloyd George: “We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”

Primarily, Churchill seems to have thought of the job as a burden of the victors, a vast population left rudderless by the First World War. If some of the decisions had been different, would the outcome have been? Possibly. But hindsight is cheap, and far too easily indulged.

Edited transcript: The original speech included certain subjects covered earlier and elsewhere. These are summarized below, and provided with links to the original texts. The video, which is unabridged, includes questions and answers with the audience.

Churchill’s World of 1932

Eighty-seven years ago, Churchill was here in Michigan, in Detroit, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor, on a U.S. lecture tour. East, west, north, and south he rode the rails, “living all day on my back in a railway compartment and addressing in the evening large audiences.” He concluded, startlingly for someone with his background, that it was the hardest work he’d had in his life.

In Detroit on February 5th, Hindu demonstrators protested his opposition to the Government of India Act. A dozen detectives supplemented his faithful bodyguard, Walter Thompson. Only a few weeks before, he’d been knocked down and nearly killed by a car in New York City. His first words on regaining consciousness were, “They almost got me that time, Thompson!” Imagine how that would have changed history.

Though fearless of protestors, Churchill never talked about domestic politics abroad—a practice that today seems almost antique. His 1932 lectures were consistent with a lifelong theme: Anglo-American unity. On March 1st in Ann Arbor, he railed against rash proposals for disarmament in the face of tyrannies: National Socialism and Soviet Socialism, which he compared to the North and South Poles, equally uninhabitable. The English-Speaking Peoples, he said, must unite to combat the world’s miseries. I thank Dick Marsh of Ann Arbor, who is with us today, for these details.

Current Contentions

Alas the noble sentiments that drove Churchill all his life have lately taken backstage to violent contentions, spread by the Internet, particularly social media, and bad movies from The Crown to Viceroy’s House. Not a month passes when he is not accused of something dreadful, from xenophobia and racism to misogyny and war crimes. Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times: “Thanks to the malleability of digital media and the jet fuel of network virality, a digital lie can spread more quickly, and cause more damage, than an analog one.”

Confronting this busy industry is a goal of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project, and our web department, “Truths & Heresies.” Last year the cacophony got so loud that, with one of our contributors, Andrew Roberts, we contemplated a “Rapid-Response Team.” Writing for a major newspaper, we’d answer each flapdoodle as it came. Unfortunately, the only paper interested was Britain’s The Sun. And Andrew and I didn’t think it dignified to publish scholarly rebuttals alongside photos of starlets in string bikinis.

Churchill is attacked more broadly today than in 1940. Back then, the Nazis just called him a drunk. Today’s critics tear him down with a longer litany: his self-centeredness; his liking for gas warfare and carpet bombing; the rude things he said about Hindus or Jews or Muslims; his disdain for anyone other than card-carrying Englishmen.

Policy critiques range from what he did—like defending Antwerp and attacking the Dardanelles—to what he didn’t do—not bombing Auschwitz, not saving Poland at Yalta. That last item is about the only thing the Soviets didn’t accuse him of after the war. See “Assault on Churchill,”

Where do people get these notions?

The Indian historian Zareer Masani offered a crisp explanation in “Churchill a War Criminal? Get Your History Right.” These attacks are “skillfully orchestrated by a few articulate and ambitious individuals, publicity-hungry detractors [who accuse him of having] more blood on his hands than Hitler, Stalin and Mao put together. There was a time when such absurd comparisons would have been dismissed as the ravings of fantasists. But today they attract a Twitter following of gullible millions, happy to swallow the tallest tale if it’s retweeted often enough. Bashing Churchill [has] become a sure-fire way of attracting a mass following, selling potboiler books and reviving flagging political careers.”

No serious historian claims Churchill was infallible. It diminishes him to treat him as superhuman. Accomplished scholars have catalogued his controversies. It is fair to consider them. But not assassins who create imaginary sins by selective editing.

The electronic lynch mob uses Twitter and Facebook and the online tabloids. They remind me of a quip by the late Umberto Eco: “Social media,” he said, “gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”

Gertrude Bell to Scott Kelly

Following Walking with Destiny, Andrew Roberts’ excellent Churchill biography, one reviewer accused him of failing to say Churchill’s actions in the Middle East drove the Arabist Gertrude Bell to suicide. That’s a new one!  It was getting so that we actually welcomed new ones.

At the 1921 Cairo Conference, Bell got all she wanted from Churchill: break-up of the Ottoman Empire; Arab states in Iraq and Jordan; her choice of kings on their thrones. She died five years later, but always spoke well of Churchill. Incidentally, it was Bell who talked him out of creating a separate Kurdistan. In retrospect, that would have avoided much trouble. Particularly for the Kurds.

Another critic said Churchill’s biggest gaffe as Chancellor of the Exchequer was to fix the pound at $4.10 in 1929, causing unemployment in the 1930s. In fact the pound, which was worth only $3.66 in 1920, rose to its prewar level of $4.80 by 1929. The devaluation to $4.10 occurred when Britain left the Gold Standard in 1931, over two years after Churchill had left office. A post-World War I recession caused the pound to sink, not the other way round.

* * *

Next, retired U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly innocently tweeted that Churchill was “one of the greatest leaders of modern times.” “Like a meteor storm bombarding a capsule in orbit, furious trolls attacked Kelly on social media,” reported the London Evening Standard. Churchill was a bigot, a mass-murderer and a racist.

Kelly groveled: “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill…. “I will go and educate myself further on his racist views which I do not support.” The newspaper mocked his meek collapse: “Of course Churchill was a great leader. It was utterly craven of Scott Kelly to apologize for saying so. The only space the astronaut ought to concentrate on is that between his ears.”

The Crown

I’m going to describe four current contentions I thought might especially interest you. Since our subject is Churchill and the Movies, let’s start with a really bad film series.

No sooner had I admired the fair, mostly balanced and accurate PBS TV series Churchill’s Secret (on his June 1953 stroke) than I was grumbling through Netflix’s The Crown. It’s about the present Queen’s ascent to the throne, and her first years as monarch.

Is it really so big a deal? Not in itself. But thanks to The Crown we’ll inevitably be told by somebody that Churchill’s stroke was kept from the Queen, that he “forced” her to move to Buckingham Palace, that he painted the same scene repeatedly in his Black Dog of despair. Productions like The Crown suggest that truth and accuracy matter less than style and perception; that reality must bend to fit the creator’s mindset. For details see  “The Crown: A Not So Crowning Achievement.”

Lady Castlerosse

We move now to the pastime of attacking Churchill’s character. Last year Britain’s Channel 4 aired a breathless documentary, “Churchill’s Secret Affair.” In the 1930s, they said, Churchill conducted a four-year affair with Doris Delevingne, Lady Castlerosse. The romance took place at the Riviera villa of the American actress Maxine Elliott, where they were occasional guests.

This was a profitable whopper for the tabloid internet. One newspaper even produced a witness, the attractive model Cara Delevingne, Doris’s grand-niece. “It was a tradition in our family,” she explained. “My mother told me.” It took me 2500 words to unravel this one in The American Spectator, and I’m not going to bore you with that. (For details see “Too Easy to be Good: The Churchill Marriage and Lady Castlerosse.”)

The Bengal Famine, 1943

Most popular by far among drive-by ambushes is the 1943-44 famine in Bengal, India. The most comments we get on it are from Indians, which is understandable. The Bengal food shortage was the greatest humanitarian crisis in India’s history. Up to three million Bengalis died. Proportionally, think 16 million Americans.

Gary Oldman’s Oscar for the Churchill film Darkest Hour was protested in the Washington Post by the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor. “Hollywood rewards a mass murderer,” and the Indian Express called WSC “an unpopular racist.” As Churchill once cracked, “The Hon. Member is never lucky in the coincidence of his facts with the truth.”  (For details see “Bengal Famine: The Hottest of Churchill Diatribes.”

The email we received from Indians on Churchill is remarkably balanced. One critical writer admitted that the British in India ended slavery and Sutti; and helped to remove the caste system. Sutti, as you may know, was the practice of wives throwing themselves (or being thrown) on top of their dead husbands’ funeral pyres. “The ladies went to their deaths with dignity, in the manner of a celebration,” read one account.

Well, if all the British did was to remove slavery, abolish Sutti, and attack the caste system, those were pretty big things. Very many of Churchill’s remarks on India show him to be a man who exalted above all, despite his imperialist upbringing, the rule of law under a just constitution—inspired in India’s case by Britain’s. That was another good thing the old Raj left in its wake. Along, of course, with cricket.

Welsh Strikers, 1910-11

Finally, just last month came another outburst, reviving a “golden oldie” nursed by British socialists for over a century: that Churchill sent the army to kill strikers in the Rhondda Valley, Wales in 1910-11. The Guardian went right to work. “Do you consider Winston Churchill a hero or a villain?” they asked John McDonnell, the Labour Party shadow chancellor of the exchequer. “Villain,”  Mr. McDonnell shot back: “Tonypandy.” A two-word gotcha! The Guardian then supplied an inaccurate rehash of the Tonypandy riots, where Churchill is supposed to have sent troops to attack strikers.

McDonnell was crushed under a massive reaction by press and public—a sign that the truth is winning. Ironically, back in the day, the same Guardian was defending Churchill for his moderation. (See “Churchill, Tonypandy and ‘Poundland Lenin.'”)

In 1965 the BBC interviewed surviving Welsh strikers, including Will Mainwaring, who had been one of the youngest militants in the South Wales coalfields. Half a century on, he still spoke with pride of championing the miners and of his record as a protestor. Of Churchill’s decision to send troops to the Rhondda in 1910 Mainwaring said:

We never thought that Winston Churchill had exceeded his natural responsibility as Home Secretary. The military did not commit one single act that allows the slightest resentment by the strikers. On the contrary, we regarded the military as having come in the form of friends to modify the otherwise ruthless attitude of the police forces.

Churchill’s Defenders Welcome Allies

For forty years, much of my work has been to defend Churchill’s good name from ignorance, some of it around for a century. It still circulates, but I’ve noticed how little now goes unchallenged.

Whenever a slander surfaces nowadays, the Hillsdale College Churchill Project is inundated with email asking us to proclaim the truth. And we’re not alone. Many sources—the Churchill Archives Centre, the various Churchill societies, academics, press and the public online, share the defense. This is an encouragement to us, to balanced biographers, and to anyone who wishes to understand the greatest Briton. The only thing worse than fighting with allies, as Churchill said, is fighting without them.

Walter Henry Thompson 

…was Winston Churchill’s protection officer and detective, on and off between 1921 and 1945. They had many adventures together, and Thompson wrote four books about his experiences. The first, Guard from the Yard (1938, now very rare) involved Churchill and others whom Thompson protected.

After World War II, Thompson published I Was Churchill’s Shadow (1951), Sixty Minutes with Winston Churchill (1953), and Assignment: Churchill (1956). He promoted them enthusiastically, with many book signings. As a Churchill bookseller, I used to describe a pristine copy of Sixty Minutes as “the rare unsigned edition.”

In 2005, Sixty Minutes was recently republished as Beside the Bulldog. Simultaneously there appeared Churchill’s Bodyguard: The Authorised Biography, which intersperses some new material with a large number of factual errors. The earlier works are pure Thompson and therefore worth seeking out.

Thompson’s Epic 

Thompson’s first Churchill assignment was the statesman’s Cairo Conference of 1921. Around the same time he was seconded to Churchill during negotiation of the Irish Treaty. When Churchill set out on a North American lecture tour in December 1931, Thompson was again assigned. The detective was resting after twenty-six-hours’ duty on December 13th, when Churchill was struck and nearly killed by a car on Fifth Avenue. Thompson always regretted that he had not been present, and perhaps able to prevent the accident.

Walter Thompson’s tall, angular features are frequently seen on Churchill photos during World War II. From 1939, when recalled to guard duty, he was rarely absent on the Prime Minister’s travels. Along the way, he accidentally shot himself while cleaning a weapon, and lost son in the RAF. He did however romance and later marry Mary Shearburn, one of the PM’s secretaries.

The Bodyguard Mini-series

I approached this production with doubt. The Authorised Biography contained so many howlers that I feared they would reappear in the video. But the episodes avoid this—and any hindsight moralizing, thought so necessary by producers today. It is, in the main, straight reporting from Thompson’s memoirs. Though I disliked Thompson’s steady references to the boss as “Winston,” I found no serious errors. Please advise if the episodes I didn’t watch contain some awful clanger!

The series does speculate in places. One such involves the actor Leslie Howard, “Ashley Wilkes” in one of Churchill’s favorite films, Gone with the Wind. The story goes that Howard and his bodyguard—shot down by the Luftwaffe in the belief they were Churchill and Thompson—were intentional decoys. This is of course nonsense.

The great strength of Churchill’s Bodyguard is its visuals. Some photos aren’t chronologically accurate, but most are little-known and fascinating. The producers cleverly applied the right poses to go with the dialogue, presenting what is almost a motion picture.

The synopses suggest that Thompson saved Churchill’s life in every episode. But I have no doubt that many potential threats did preoccupy him. And to his credit, he disregarded no possibility.

Churchill’s Bodyguard Synopsis (IMdb)

Sadly, all but three of these videos have been deleted from YouTube. Links to the other three (below) were still active in mid-2019.

Introductions. Here we learn how two very different characters met, and how Thompson, born in the East End, saves his boss from an IRA assassination attempt. Ten years earlier, they had both been present, unknowingly, at the Siege of Sidney Street.

Middle East, 1921. Walter Thompson gets the challenge of keeping his boss alive during a visit to the Middle East. A leading British politician is the natural target for assassins, and on several critical occasions, Thompson is helped by the enigmatic Lawrence of Arabia.

The 1920s; travels in the New World 1929-32. Churchill buys cars and a house. In 1929 ceases to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and Thompson’s duties end. Within two years, Churchill’s outspoken views gain him new and deadly enemies, and Thompson is recalled.

North American Lecture Tour 1932. Thompson keeps Churchill safe during his lecture tour, but then leaves the police force. It seems that Churchill’s career is over, too. But a sinister new force is rising which sees him as an implacable enemy. Threats to his life bring the two men together again.

* * *

From Wilderness to War 1932-40. Despite being out of office, Churchill’s enemies prove dangerous. With war imminent, French Intelligence hears of a German assassination plot. Thompson returns from retirement. Britain goes to war in September 1939, and Churchill is back at the Admiralty.

Dangerous Travels and the Fall of France 1940. Sent to the Admiralty in September 1939, Churchill becomes Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, as Hitler invades the Low Countries. He embarks on a campaign of personal diplomacy, with travels including six trips to France. To Thompson’s concern, they are often within range of Luftwaffe fighters.

Surviving the Blitz, 1940-41. The early days of the war prove difficult and dangerous. The Luftwaffe bombs London. The Prime Minister walks the streets among the people, watches air raids from rooftops, and visits anti-aircraft batteries. Often only Thompson is with him.

Meetings with FDR, 1941-42. Running a gauntlet of U-boats in the North Atlantic, Churchill sets out for meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt. On one return journey, as the PM prepares to board a flying boat for the trip home, a gunman lurks nearby.

* * *

Turning Point, 1942-43. A precarious trip to Moscow to visit Stalin is followed by victory for the Eighth Army in North Africa. Aware that Churchill is traveling, the Germans at least twice try to shoot down his plane.

Teheran, 1943. After two Atlantic crossings and two trips across the Mediterranean, Churchill grows increasingly frustrated with Allied planners and suspicious of Stalin. When the Big Three meet in Tehran in 1943, the Germans launch Operation Longjump, in which commandoes plan to parachute into the city.

The Kiss of Life, 1943. Returning from the Tehran Conference, a sick and exhausted Churchill survives a dangerous illness, Thompson keeping vigil at his bedside.

Athens, 1944. Flying to Greece to forestall a civil war, Churchill plans to stay at a hotel where communist guerrillas had placed dynamite. He changes quarters to HMS Ajax in Piraeus harbor, while guerrillas fire at the ship.

Victory in Europe, 1945. Churchill and Thompson make several journeys through jubilant crowds. Churchill wants to walk among them. Instead Thompson pulls him onto the roof of his car,  accidentally breaking a woman’s arm in the process.