- from Amazon:
 "It is not an interview with the Prime Minister. He is too busy to give interviews and his sense of fairness long ago forced him to make the rule of 'no interviews'. If he couldn't give an interview to all, he wouldn't give an interview to one. But I spent two days with him and this story is of the Winston Churchill I got to know well in forty-eight hours."
Shortly after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a solemn visit to the White House in order to plot the course of the war with FDR. The affect that the Prime Minister impressed upon the average American was profound and was soon made manifest in the form of innumerable gifts that began descending upon the White House addressed to him. An unsigned editorial in Collier's Magazine noticed the event and remarked:
"If we hadn't liked Mr. Churchill immensely from the moment he arrived here, none of us would have sent him anything. The size and variety of this shower of gifts are the best measure of the terrific hit he made with all kinds and conditions of Americans."
"He is only thirty-eight now and he is a member of the English Ministry... he has been a wonder of the Empire since he was twenty-five. The only American he can be compared to is [Teddy] Roosevelt; and that comparison is not especially apt, because Churchill writes far better than Roosevelt does, talks far better, and at thirty-eight has gone farther than Roosevelt had when he reached that age... Churchill will undoubtedly be a prime minister of England one of these days." After the British withdrawal from Gallipoli it was time for the architect of the disaster, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to resign his office. Wishing to still play a part in the Great War, Churchill assumed the rank of Major with his old regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars:
"To have been ruler of the King's Navy, and then to take a subordinate place in a trench in Flanders, involved a considerable change even for one whose life had been full of startling and dramatic moments".
Click here to read a review of Churchill's remembrance of World War I .
Click here to read about FDR as Under-Secretary of the Navy.
This is a very interesting magazine article concerning the 1920s British experience in Iraq (Mesopotamia); regardless as to where the reader stands concerning the 2003 Iraq War, you will find a striking similarity in the language used in this piece and the articles printed prior to the U.S. infantry surge of 2008: - from Amazon:
  "Unless there is a complete change of policy, Mesopotamia, which has been the grave of empires, is now likely to be the grave of the Coalition".
Click here to read more articles about the British struggle for 1920s Mesopotamia.
H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill first met in 1901. Churchill was a deep admirer of Well's fiction, and he eagerly pursued a friendship. The two enjoyed a spirited exchange of letters that went on for decades - although it seemed to have taken a hit in the Twenties when the two disagreed on the nascent USSR - but their friendship was not seriously shaken. In this 1940 article, Wells stepped up to tell American readers how fortunate Britons are to have such a man of discernment standing at the helm:
"I will confess I have never felt so disposed to stand by a man through thick and thin as I do now in regard to him. And I think that, in writing that, I write for a very great number of my fellow countrymen who have hitherto felt frustrated and fragmentary amidst the rush of events." |