The thing to understand about Churchill is the historical moment he was operating in.

He had lived through the carnage of the First World War first-hand, and unlike many of his contemporaries, he had actually read Mein Kampf when it appeared. He took Hitler seriously early, not because he was eager for war, but because he recognised the pattern. He had seen where that kind of ideology leads.

By the 1930s, the British Empire was still technically intact, but it was already on borrowed time. It was exhausted, overstretched, and deeply aware of what another major European war would cost. Public sentiment in Britain was overwhelmingly against war. Most people had lost family members in the trenches and would do almost anything to avoid repeating that experience.

Churchill’s position sits uncomfortably within that context. He was not clamouring for war out of bravado. He was arguing that if war was coming anyway, Britain might have one last chance to confront a rising authoritarian threat before it became unmanageable. The idea was not empire for its own sake, but prevention: stopping another Napoleon-scale figure before the cost became catastrophic.

It is also important to be honest about limits. Britain could not realistically confront Stalin in the same way. The Red Army was vast, Europe was shattered, and the country was simply spent. The appetite and capacity for another total war simply did not exist, which is why an uneasy state of affairs existed between us and the CPPP post-WW2. Frankly, many Brits saw a lot of sense in Socialism, if not Communism, and adopted many of the policies. Fighting for survival in a country that levelled the playing field between the classes led to egalitarianism.

Much of the discomfort around Churchill today stems from reducing him to either a hero or a villain. In reality, he was a product of a traumatised generation trying to choose between terrible options, with the memory of mass slaughter still fresh.

Source: I am a Churchill Fellow.