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Right About the Wolf: Churchill's Wilderness Years and the Appeasement Trap
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Churchill spent the 1930s warning Britain about Hitler while his own party wrote him off as a relic — and history proved him devastatingly right. This chapter explores his wilderness years, the architects of appeasement, and the personal cost of being the prophet no one wanted.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Most people picture Winston Churchill as a titan. The cigar, the bulldog jaw, the voice that held a nation together while bombs fell on London.
By the late nineteen twenties, Churchill had lived several political lifetimes. He'd entered Parliament in nineteen hundred as a Conservative MP for Oldham.
And then, in nineteen thirty three, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Churchill saw it immediately.
The dominant policy of the nineteen thirties in British foreign affairs was appeasement. The word has since become a term of contempt, but at the time, it was a considered strategy held by serious men.
What often gets lost in the political story is what this decade cost Churchill personally. He'd spent the nineteen thirties largely at Chartwell, his house in Kent.
By nineteen thirty eight and into thirty nine, it was becoming harder to maintain the fiction that Churchill had simply been alarmist. Germany had remilitarised the Rhineland.
There's a line of interpretation that treats Churchill's wilderness years purely as a story of vindication. He was right, they were wrong, and in the end the world caught up to him.
By the spring of nineteen forty, the war was going badly. France was under assault.
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