Winston Churchill's Accomplishments

The most powerful weapon in a man’s arsenal will, and forever will be, his words. A proper speech, given at the right time to the right public could move a country, send men to the moon, or even wage wars. This capacity is incredibly important today, more than ever with globalization, as words can travel far and wide in an instant. Moreover, it would be hard to look at the past and wonder what could have been if those words had never been spoken in the first place. For example, if Martin Luther King had never shared his dream, or if Adolf Hitler was born mute. The world would without a doubt be a much different place than it is now. In one such instance, of history altering orating prowess, one may cite Sir Winston Churchill as one of the

He was the product of the alcoholic, politician Lord Randolph Churchill and an American mother named Jennie Jerome. According to the Historian Richard Dimbleby, Churchill’s early life and childhood was bleak, unhappy and not very successful. Moreover, he states that Churchill’s dad “believed that his son was academically unsuited for politics or law, had him placed in the army class”. The future prime minister even failed his entrance exam three times before making it into the military school. However, this moment marked a turning point in young Winston Churchill’s life as he took pleasure to hard work and to prove his parents wrong applied himself seriously to graduate in the top of his class at Sanhurst military academy in 1895. From then on started a short military career as he reported news from Cuba, served in India, and in 1898 fought in the battle of Omdurman in Sudan as part of the last ever recorded cavalry charge. Churchill then went on inexplicably to become a newspaper correspondent in South Africa, covering the Boer War. There he was noticed by the London Morning Post which he came to work for as a war journalist, because of which many biographers would then go on to say that, ‘‘Churchill used the English language as if he invented it”. Through this time, he was an insatiable reader, especially of old parliamentary debates as old notes were found with his imaginary contributions and wrote an

With practice in the art of rhetoric’s which was invaluable according to Churchill himself, his political career thrived accordingly. In 1904 he became the youngest cabinet minister in the house of commons and in 1914 became the First Lord of the Admiralty which gave him oversight of the British naval forces during World War I. During this time Winston Churchill wrote to his wife about his worldview and famously described himself as “everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?”. After the war Churchill went back to office this time as a conservative as opposed to be a liberal earlier in his career. However, his voice was now surprisingly marginalized as his opposition to giving Britain’s Indian empire greater power of self-governance and his support for King Edward VIII in the 1936 abdication crisis left him sidelined. Churchill’s Warning about the rise of Hitler, who will be known in history to be his direct nemesis, and the Nazis also went unnoticed. He opposed the current prime minister’s decision to sign an agreement with Hitler in 1938 by saying the British had been “given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war”. It was only after the Nazi’s had invaded Poland that Churchill was called back from his “political exile”