Original subtitles

Narrator: May 1940,

darkness had descended upon the world.

Germany and her allies

controlled large swathes of Europe.

Japan had invaded China

and was looking to expand her empire further.

Britain, and empire, were under threat.

But if anybody likes to play rough,

we can play rough too.

Narrator: In this fractured world,

Winston Churchill became prime minister

of the United Kingdom.

He did so with a clear goal - victory.

Now we are at war, and we are going to make war,

until the other side have had enough of it.

Narrator: This is the story of the man who led britain

and her empire through one of the darkest moments

in its history.

This is Winston Churchill's war.

Narrator: In September 1939,

Germany, led by Adolf Hitler's Nazi party,

invaded Poland.

France, britain,

and the commonwealth dominions,

were quick to declare war on Germany,

but could do little to directly support

their beleaguered Polish ally.

16 days later, the Soviet union

invaded Poland from the east, taking advantage

of the instability to annex their own territory.

By October, all of Poland was occupied,

and Germany was making plans for further advancements

in Europe's west.

The second world war had begun,

a war that would plunge the world into conflict

for over six years.

By the spring of 1940, Nazi Germany had launched

successful offensives across Western Europe.

Adolf Hitler,

and his fascist ally Benito Mussolini,

now dominated much of mainland Europe,

and Hitler had his sights set on Great Britain.

The British empire faced a menace

greater than any she had faced in centuries.

Against this threat,

britain's newly appointed prime minister,

Winston Churchill, resolved to fight

to the end.

He, and the British empire, were determined,

"to wage war against a monstrous tyranny."

This was a decision that profoundly shaped

the outcome of the second world war,

and would come to define a man

who had himself believed that he was destined

to lead his nation.

- Lift up your heart, all will come right,

out of the depths of sorrow and of sacrifice

will be born again the glory of mankind.

Narrator: How did Winston Churchill

come to fulfil his self-appointed destiny?

Did class, opportunity, and good fortune

pre-determine his fate?

Or did a combination of will, drive,

and ambition keep him on his course?

It was the life he lived before the war

that had prepared Churchill for the struggles

and toil that arrived in 1940...

..The successes and the failures

that helped and hindered,

as he led his nation's fight

through years of war.

Narrator: Churchill was born in blenheim palace in 1874.

The same year as the first impressionist art exhibition.

This was a fitting coincidence for a man

who would later develop a passion for painting.

It was a passion shared by another key

20th century figure.

A figure whose life and actions would become

intertwined with Churchill's own.

Adolf Hitler.

Although Hitler was born 15 years after Churchill,

both would be defined by their actions

in the second world war.

Their fates would converge in 1940,

but their lives began very differently.

Born in Austria in 1889,

Hitler was the son of a civil servant

and a doting mother.

Up until the first world war,

Hitler was a man in search of purpose.

Winston Churchill, by contrast,

was born into the English aristocracy.

- Churchill was an extraordinary mixture

of English aristocrat and American tycoon.

His father was the youngest son

of the Duke of marlborough.

His mother was the daughter of Leonard Jerome,

who was an amazing American speculator,

who won and lost fortunes all the time.

He was a strange mixture of this

immensely distinguished English family,

and an American gambler.

Narrator: Churchill's father, lord Randolph Churchill,

was inattentive and largely emotionally absent,

despite young Winston's many childhood pleas

in letters from boarding school.

As a child, Churchill did not easily fit

within the conventional frameworks of schooling.

He was not lacking in intellect,

but Latin gave him trouble,

and mathematics was a challenge.

His early career in the British army

was equally unconventional.

He possessed a strong sense of self

beyond the institution.

But more than that, he considered himself a man

destined for bigger things.

- He had a supreme self-confidence.

At age 21, he was telling people

that he was destined to become prime minister

of england, and they believed him.

He had this ambition, but he also had

a staggering capacity for work.

He read. He prepared himself.

He educated himself for this political career.

And he said, even at that early age,

that he was intending to beat his sword

into an undispatch box, and succeed in parliament.

Narrator: Churchill also longed

for battle and adventure.

During the second world war, he sought out opportunities

to travel as close as he could to the battlefield.

These impulses had begun as a young adult.

In the 1890s, Churchill worked as a writer

and war correspondent, as well as actively serving

in the British army in Cuba, India,

Sudan, and South Africa.

Even in his early years, he found ways

to successfully meld war with words.

- Churchill had really established his reputation

before the end of the victorian era

with his early books 'the malakand field force',

'the river war' and so forth.

And he had been straight from the start,

a master of the condensed epigrammatic phrase.

In fact, his early rhetoric is better,

it's far more muscular than his later rhetoric

in world war two.

Narrator: Churchill's initial experience in politics

was not a success.

In 1899, he ran as a conservative candidate

in a by-election in the seat of oldham, but did not win.

The next year, in the general election,

he managed to secure a seat by a slim margin.

He took his seat in November 1900,

while queen Victoria still reigned over britain

and the empire.

It was here during his early days in the house of commons,

where Churchill refined his rhetorical ability

which would later fortify the nation at war in 1940.

- Indeed, now that I come to think of it,

it was at westminster that I received

a very large part of my education in politics,

dialectic, rhetoric,

and one or two other things.

- He was very good at the prepared set oration,

but he knew this himself, he wasn't particularly good

at being spontaneous.

- I've learned a lot in these 31 years.

Many things have happened to the world.

- His technique from the earliest days in politics

was to memorise long and detailed speech.

Early in his career, in 1904,

he was in the house of commons,

he was almost all the way through his speech,

and then suddenly he had a kind of a brain freeze,

couldn't remember what he was going to say,

sort of stuttered a few words, and sat down.

From then on, he almost always worked from a text.

Narrator: In 1904, Churchill crossed the floor,

shifting his allegiance from the conservatives

to the liberal party.

And as Churchill continued to build

his political career, he also sought, and found,

happiness in his personal life.

Clementine hozier first met Winston Churchill

at a ball in 1904.

She later recalled he hadn't said a word to her

in their first encounter.

He just stood and stared.

Winston proposed at his birthplace, blenheim palace,

in August 1908, and they were married

the very next month at st Margaret's westminster.

In the wars and political storms to come,

Clementine remained a beacon of strength and support.

Britain may have stood alone in those dark days of 1940,

but Churchill certainly did not.

In July 1914,

European tensions transformed into war.

Churchill had become

first lord of the admiralty in 1911.

With the first world war underway,

this position as the political head

of the royal Navy was strategically important.

Churchill's role in the failed gallipoli campaign

in 1915 earned him infamy

that lives on to the present day.

The plan to use the royal Navy,

to try to force passage through the dardanelles,

sail a fleet to bombard constantinople,

and force Turkey out of the war,

ended in abject failure.

The land campaign that followed

also ended in defeat and withdrawal in January 1916,

after eight months of fighting.

The blame for the failed gallipoli campaign

was largely laid at Churchill's feet.

In may 1915, shortly after the failure at gallipoli,

prime minister asquith formed a new government

with the conservatives.

They insisted Churchill lose his position

as first lord of the admiralty,

and he ultimately resigned from the government.

Churchill now turned his attention

to what contribution he might make as a soldier.

In early 1916, Churchill took command

of the 6th battalion of the royal Scots fusiliers

and was sent to serve on the western front.

The battalion he led had been savaged

in the battle of loos the previous September,

and morale was low.

As lieutenant-colonel,

Churchill entered the trenches with his men

at ploegsteert on the Belgian front

in late January 1916, where the unit was subject

to shellfire and suffered casualties.

After a short stint of leave in London in march,

Churchill returned to the battlefield.

But he returned as a man in two minds,

feeling the pull of politics once again.

When it was clear that his unit would be absorbed

into another, with someone else in command,

Churchill resigned his commission in may 1916.

In mid-1917, Churchill secured a position

as minister of munitions.

The first world war was a war of machines.

Aircraft, artillery, and armour

all came to the fore on Europe's battlefields.

The experience at the end of the first world war

had shown what a combination of weapon systems could do.

It was no longer about artillery

and infantry individually, it was about infantry,

armour, aircraft, intelligence, artillery,

underground mines.

Everything you could think of working in Harmony

to try and break any future deadlock.

Narrator: Churchill understood this.

He had promoted the value of the tank since early 1915

when, as first lord of the admiralty,

he had established the landships committee.

By 1918, Churchill's instincts on the potential

of the tank were proven right.

The infantry and armoured corps had learned to work

more effectively together, and tanks became

a key element of the British war effort.

During his tenure as minister for munitions,

he also briefly met Franklin Roosevelt.

In July 1918, they both attended a dinner

in the banquet hall of gray's inn, London.

When the two met again years later,

Churchill had forgotten their earlier encounter.

Roosevelt had not,

and he did not have fond memories of it.

Roosevelt recalled that Churchill

had "acted like a stinker."

Churchill and Roosevelt were not the only future leaders

whose experiences in the first world war

would inform their leadership in the second.

Adolf Hitler also served in the war.

Perhaps for the first time in his life,

Hitler found purpose in the bavarian army

in the first world war.

He served on the western front

and was considered a good soldier.

In 1918, when news of

the German surrender reached him,

Hitler was in hospital,

recovering from a mustard gas attack.

- So in 1919, Hitler is staying with the army.

Biographers of Hitler always say that the army

was really the only home he had ever had,

at least since his childhood.

He starts in the course of 1919 to develop a career

as a political education officer for the army.

They ask him to give lectures to troops on politics.

And this is where he discovers

the one thing he could really do - as he wrote,

"I found I could speak."

Narrator: One topic on which Hitler spoke about at length

was the treaty of versailles,

and the 'stab in the back' legend -

the contention that the war had been lost,

not on the battlefield,

but because of internal dissent on the home front.

- The stab in the back was a common currency

among all Germans. They all thought

they'd been betrayed, this was the kind of

normative discourse.

But the Nazis gave it a special prominence.

They were planting this idea of grievance and betrayal

in the German people,

and they did it very effectively.

Narrator: Signed at the 1919 Paris peace conference,

the treaty of versailles had imposed severe penalties

on Germany, including loss of territory,

restrictions on the military,

and reparations in the billions.

Churchill had also attended the Paris peace conference

as secretary of state for air and war.

Though he was not directly involved in the peace talks,

he was involved in discussions about the shape

of the post-war world.

In February 1921, Churchill became

secretary of state for the colonies.

He held responsibility for all colonial dependencies

of the United Kingdom,

including areas of the middle east

under British influence.

In the wake of the war

and the defeat of the ottoman empire,

national borders across the region

were being redrawn by the British and the French.

Winston Churchill, colonial secretary by this stage,

brings together military officials,

colonial officials, interested parties,

to literally sit down over the course of the conference,

to put all of their ideas on paper

and to come up with the arrangements that will

become the boundaries that we recognise today.

Narrator: Churchill's knowledge of the history

and cultures of the area did not run deep,

and this lack of a nuanced understanding by Churchill,

and his British and French peers,

had serious consequences in the creation

of nations' borders, including Lebanon,

Syria and Iraq.

- Iraq is the most artificial of all the states

that are created, because essentially,

they are lumping together three very distinct provinces

of Baghdad, Basra and mosul,

saying, "you are now a single state."

But the inhabitants of those provinces

don't necessarily see or recognise themselves

as being within a single nation state.

And many of the issues to do with sectarian violence

that are ongoing in Iraq to this day

stem out from this.

Narrator: In 1922, Churchill lost his seat

at a general election, despite the efforts

of Clementine who had campaigned for him

while he was ill with appendicitis.

At the age of 47, Churchill was out of government.

But by 1924, he had re-joined the ranks

of the conservatives, a move that put him

back in government, and in a position

of significant authority

as chancellor of the exchequer -

the position his father had once held.

Churchill's father had been chancellor of the exchequer,

and he'd made a great fuss about the decimal points,

which he called "those damn dots".

Churchill didn't have much more of a clue

about those damn dots than his father had.

He wasn't very good at finance at all.

Narrator: The return to the gold standard

was Churchill's defining action in this role.

The gold standard was a system which linked

the currency directly to a fixed quantity of gold.

The decision is often criticised,

some suggesting it a Mark of incompetence,

but Churchill was not lax in his role.

He did not make the decision lightly,

and had in fact resisted it.

He even hosted a dinner party

with key economic advisers,

further interrogating the issue.

- He took advice, in the end he took the wrong advice,

returning britain to the gold standard,

largely as an expression of political virility.

He wanted the pound to be strong,

but it was too strong, and it undermined the economy,

and it perhaps helped to make the depression more severe,

perhaps even to have helped cause the depression.

Narrator: The return to the gold standard

did strengthen the pound, but this made UK exports

uncompetitive, and caused widespread unemployment.

The outcome was not a good one for Churchill

or the economy, but the incident tells us

something of the man who would lead britain in war.

Hosting dinner late into the night

foreshadowed the many late-night discussions

he would hold during the second world war.

It also suggested he was willing to rely

on expert advice, even if he disagreed with it.

Churchill's experience as chancellor also offered him

another chance to hone his oratory.

His budget speeches were quite the spectacle.

His speeches as chancellor, his budget speeches,

which went on and on and on,

sustained by copious draughts of whiskey,

where the most brilliant entertainments

that you could possibly hear.

I mean, they were absolutely wonderful.

Everybody loved him for these really witty accounts

of what he was going to do to the economy,

but in practice, he didn't live up to the rhetoric.

Narrator: In may 1929, Churchill's time

as chancellor came to an end with the victory

of the labour party under ramsay MacDonald.

The 1930s are often called Churchill's wilderness years.

Although he remained a sitting mp,

he turned his attention to writing

and to furthering his publication record.

A number of issues dominated his focus in this period,

and one in particular showed him to be

out of step with the modern world.

His position on India, and his stubborn resistance

to the growing clamour for independence,

was an obsession that marked him

as a dated imperialist.

- Things are going from bad to worse.

Great mismanagement and weakness

are causing unrest and disturbance

to 300 million primitive people

whose wellbeing is in our care.

We require to have a clear, practical policy,

and to pursue it with courage and with conviction.

Narrator: Mahatma Gandhi had become the influential leader

of the independence movement after 1918,

promoting non-violent non-cooperation.

In britain, and in parliament,

views on the independence of India began to diverge.

- So this argument starts to come out between people

like Churchill who were really, if you like,

the representatives of deep imperialism -

that India was there as a British possession forever,

and if the British didn't rule over India,

India would just fall apart.

As he famously said, "India is no more a nation

"than the equator,"

that it had no meaning as a nation.

So he completely dismissed Indian nationalism.

I feel that the Indian danger will raise a crisis

equal in importance to the greatest events

in the history of Great Britain.

- So, on the one hand, people like Churchill,

on the other hand, some of the more pragmatic

liberal and labour politicians,

who realised that, at some point,

you would have to start to devolve power.

- And finally I hope that by our labours together,

India will possess the only thing which she now lacks -

full responsibility for her own government.

Narrator: Churchill was particularly dismissive

of Gandhi.

To Churchill, ghandi was an enemy of empire.

- The Tory party was gradually moving towards

a position of giving tranches of independence to India,

first of all provincial independence,

and perhaps eventually becoming a free dominion

to join Canada and Australia.

Churchill hated this, it was anathema to him.

- So a lot of effort that Churchill spent

in politics up until 1935, was in trying to defeat

the British government's government of India bill,

which was to extend a measure of self-government to India.

And there was, it's got to be said,

an element of racism in his attitude towards India.

He talked about Gandhi as a "half-naked fakir",

and used really rather horrible terms

towards the Indians,

called them a "foul race" and so on.

He was wholly on the wrong side of the flow of history.

Narrator: At the same time, he was also delivering

perceptive warnings about the rise of the far-right

in Germany.

- We don't know the exact point

at which he first heard the name 'Hitler',

but we can say that prior to Hitler seizing power,

he was certainly aware of Hitler,

and was reading news reports coming out of Germany,

and was concerned about the threat

that he potentially posed,

and was concerned about Hitler's antisemitism.

Narrator: Churchill watched as Hitler,

who had found his voice on the battlefields

of the western front,

began using it in the political sphere.

- So at the same time that he was starting to warn

about the dangers of Germany,

and to advocate British rearmament,

he was also engaged in this parallel,

and ultimately unsuccessful effort,

to defeat reform in India.

And so the way Churchill later told the story

in his memoirs was to very much emphasise his efforts

to combat the Nazis, and to downplay his efforts

with respect to India.

Narrator: Hitler's rise to power

began in a shattered post-war Bavaria.

He joined the German workers party in 1919.

In 1920, the party changed its name

to the nationalist socialist German workers party,

better known to history as the Nazis.

By 1921, he was its leader.

In 1929, the depression caused economic instability,

and Hitler used it to strengthen the Nazi party.

In 1932, Hitler won 36% of the votes

in the presidential election against hindenburg,

and he used this strong position to his advantage.

In the negotiations that followed, he held firm.

He would take the role of chancellor of Germany

and nothing less.

- Hitler absolutely had an all-or-nothing approach

to gaining power.

One of the real skills that Hitler had in politics

was a brilliant sense of timing.

He had the nerves to wait, not jump too soon

at an opportunity in which he might be closed out

of power and not be able to do what he wanted to do.

And so he was willing to wait until that was in fact

handed to him, in late January, 1933.

Narrator: President hindenburg

had made a fatal mistake in thinking he could control

Hitler in some kind of partnership.

But Hitler's ambition to become dictator

burned as fiercely as the fire

that engulfed the reichstag

a month after he accepted the chancellorship.

He quickly executed a plan to gain full control.

In march 1933, the enabling act passed,

which gave Hitler dictatorial powers.

The German parliament had underestimated

the rising dictator,

and they were not alone in doing so.

- Chamberlain and other western politicians

made very much the same kind of miscalculation.

They looked at him, they thought, you know,

"what is this man?

"Can we really take him seriously?

"Could he possibly be a threat,

"or is this somebody, perhaps,

"that we can manipulate, we can bring him

"to the conference table,

"we can discuss things with him?"

And so on and so on.

But he was a phenomenon, Hitler,

nobody quite like him in the 1930s.

[Speaking German]

Narrator: In 1930, Churchill wrote an essay

on Hitler, revealing conflicting thoughts.

He admired his love for country

and what he called Hitler's "vital force"

in achieving his goals.

He also understood the frustration Germans felt

at the punitive reparations

imposed by the treaty of versailles.

Even so, he recognised the darkness of the man.

- Churchill was extremely perceptive about Hitler.

Some people have said that he recognised the devil

in Hitler because he had a bit of devil in himself.

But very, very early on, he talked about the menace

that Hitler represented.

The militarism, the belligerence,

the hostility to the Jews,

the crushing of any Democratic elements

in Germany, and worst of all, as far as Churchill

was concerned, the threat of a revival

of the first world war.

Narrator: While Churchill's warnings on appeasement

went unheeded for some time in parliament,

they did not go unnoticed in Germany.

- Churchill wrote an article, which was published in 1935,

in a British magazine called 'the strand magazine',

called 'the truth about Hitler.'

it was a somewhat ambiguous article in some ways,

but towards the end of the article,

he strongly denounced the night of the long knives,

and Hitler's murder of his former collaborators in 1934,

in, you know, some really quite strong

and violent language.

And the Germans immediately reacted

by banning this article.

Narrator: Churchill's fears about Hitler

were well-founded.

The darkness he feared did indeed rise.

- By the late 1930s, Churchill's prophecies

were being seen to be realised,

because in 1936, we got Hitler marching

into the rhineland, tearing up the treaty of locarno,

the anschluss with Austria,

and then eventually the gobbling up

of czechoslovakia in two slices.

So, Churchill was often wrong.

One might almost say that he was almost invariably wrong,

but he was right when it mattered,

and that was the crucial thing about it.

Narrator: As Hitler's powers grew,

domestic issues in britain

also called Churchill's attention.

One such issue was the abdication

of king Edward viii in 1936.

It was an affair that scandalised the empire.

The king had fallen for a married woman,

Wallis Simpson, and he would willingly give up

his role and duty as sovereign

for a life with his great love.

Churchill had known Edward since before

the first world war,

and Edward had often sought his advice.

Churchill sympathised with the king,

but he did not support the abdication.

Churchill, as one of the leaders of the opposition,

pushed the government for more time

so Edward could reconsider his decision.

But Edward's mind was made up, and in December 1936,

he made history.

- By an instrument of abdication,

dated the tenth day of December instant,

his former majesty king Edward viii,

did declare his irrevocable determination

to renounce the throne for himself

and his descendants.

God save the king.

Narrator: In a speech following the abdication,

Churchill warned of potential external threats

to empire.

"Danger gathers upon our path," he cautioned,

urging all to support the king's successor

and ensure a strong, united empire.

But britain, and in particular

its members of parliament, were not united in the plan

against German aggression.

- I'm going to meet the German chancellor

because the situation seems to me

to be one in which discussions

between him and me may have useful consequences.

Narrator: In 1938, the Munich Agreement

made clear the rifts in opinion

on German appeasement.

- Look at this shot in which you see

the statesmen all together - Mussolini, Hitler,

daladier, and the camera pans over

to mr Chamberlain on the right.

It is two o'clock in the morning,

an agreement has been reached.

Narrator: In the Munich Agreement,

Germany, Italy, France and britain

agreed to the German annexation of the sudetenland

in western czechoslovakia.

- There was, of course, significant opposition

and anger about the Munich Agreement

within some elements of the conservative party

amongst the anti-appeasers -

Churchill and his circle, Eden and his circle.

- Churchill certainly regarded the Munich Agreement

as a sell-out of czechoslovakia

by britain and France.

In parliament, he even went so far as to say

that czechoslovakia could have done better negotiating

by itself rather than involving britain

and France in the negotiations.

He believed that only the threat of a declaration

of war would have prevented the dismemberment

of czechoslovakia.

Narrator: Churchill's opposition to the agreement

was not to suggest he was actively seeking war,

but rather seeking to stop Hitler.

- No-one was saying that they wanted war.

Churchill wasn't saying what he wanted was war.

There were just different roads to peace

that they were proposing.

But what they were really saying was,

"we need to fight this war at some point,

"we can't keep on giving in to Hitler."

Narrator: For many, the sacrifice

of the sudetenland was a step too far in appeasement.

- Even though we should give due regard to the fact

that Chamberlain and appeasement was popular

around the world, there was a real sense of shame

and embarrassment at what britain had done,

at how it had abandoned a worthy ally in the Czechs,

and what was going on behind the scenes.

Narrator: During the inter-war period,

Churchill also warned of the threat of bolshevism,

and the influence of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

The Soviet union had formed in the wake

of the 1917 Russian revolution.

Stalin emerged as the undisputed leader in 1929.

He had his former rival for the leadership,

Leon trotsky, expelled from the Soviet union in 1929,

and in 1940, assassinated.

- After the first world war, Churchill was obsessed

by what had happened in Russia in 1917,

the Russian revolution.

He saw the bolsheviks as a danger similar

to that of the jacobins in the 18th century -

as revolutionaries who were going to overthrow

not just the Russian order, but the world order.

They posed a threat to humanity, to civilisation.

Narrator: Churchill's concerns

about the threat of communism were deeply ingrained.

His suspicions, and mistrust of Stalin,

would endure throughout the second world war.

But he was also a pragmatist.

As the threat of Germany grew,

Churchill recognised the Soviet union

might serve as a useful ally.

- During the 1930s, he's actually

potentially willing to work with the Soviet union.

You can see that he now saw the Nazis

as a greater threat than the bolsheviks,

and was prepared, potentially at least,

to work with the lesser evil.

Narrator: The inter-war period

was a time of emerging leaders

jockeying for power and position.

Germany had Hitler.

The Soviet union, Stalin.

And Italy had Mussolini.

[Speaking Italian]

- Churchill's initial response to Mussolini

when he heard about him was, "what a swine Mussolini is,"

but Clementine, his wife, went out and met Mussolini,

and was very intoxicated with him -

he was a mesmeric character, Mussolini.

And Churchill, too, became rather addicted

to Mussolini when he met him and he felt that he was going

to save Italy,

particularly save Italy from the communists.

[Speaking Italian]

His disillusionment came in 1935,

with Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia.

After that, his opinion of him continued to slide

until eventually Mussolini joined the axis,

and in due course, joined Hitler in the war.

Narrator: Not all the leaders on the world stage

in the inter-war years were a potential threat

to britain.

Churchill was also forging

an important political relationship

with a powerful ally in Franklin Roosevelt,

and the United States.

- Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt

is one of the great stories of the second world war.

Of course, it was Roosevelt who initiated

that relationship. He wrote to Churchill

in September of 1939, when Churchill was still

first lord of the admiralty, and of course,

Roosevelt was a great naval enthusiast

and was excited by the fact that this strong character

was now in charge of the royal Navy.

And this started this remarkable correspondence

and relationship between the two of them

that would last throughout the second world war.

Narrator: Churchill admired much about Roosevelt.

His sense of social justice, and he thought him a man

of composure who was equally capable of action,

"a statesman of world renown."

But he also viewed some of Roosevelt's social reforms

with suspicion.

Though they would share a common goal and enemy,

they had deeply contrasting world views.

- It's a fascinating story,

I mean, they really enjoyed each other's company,

but they came from two different universes.

Churchill was kind of a victorian figure

who was a great believer in the British empire.

Roosevelt frankly detested colonialism

and found that aspect of Churchill's worldview

really reprehensible.

Narrator: In the years to come,

Churchill would work closely with Roosevelt and Stalin

in the fight against the axis.

And in that partnership, he would be forced

to confront a shifting reality,

where the views of the prime minister

of the British empire were becoming less central

to the changing power dynamics of the new world.

In September 1939, the second world war

broke out in Europe.

Germany had invaded Poland, and two days later,

France and britain declared war on Germany.

- The fateful hour of 11:00 has struck,

and britain's final warning to Hitler

having been ignored, a state of war

once more exists between Great Britain and Germany.

Narrator: This marked the start of the 'phoney war',

a period of almost eight months

where the only action seen by British forces was at sea.

Prime minister Neville Chamberlain

appointed Churchill first lord of the admiralty.

The same position he had occupied

in the first world war.

- Churchill took a very aggressive approach

as the first lord of the admiralty.

He was the only hawk, if you'd like,

in the Chamberlain ministry, which was made up

of all the ministers that were there during Munich.

Churchill immediately instigated a programme

to increase the size of the British army.

- Anyone can see that public opinion

is growing in favour of compulsory national service

in all its forms,

and especially in the highest form.

- He wanted to modernise the royal Navy.

And he was very much about action.

You know, immediate action.

Narrator: This action ultimately translated

to a military strategy, which instead

of attacking Germany head on,

favoured a peripheral approach.

In early 1940,

Churchill's focus had shifted to scandinavia.

Hitler was shipping high grade iron ore

from Sweden to Germany via Norway.

Churchill wanted to stop him.

- He was very anxious to interrupt the supply

of iron ore from Norway,

which had been a tactic used by the British

in the first world war.

So he was very aggressive.

Narrator: The royal Navy, under Churchill's direction,

mined the approaches to Norway,

and planned a British landing force.

- That aggression ultimately led

to the German invasion of Norway.

Germany had never planned to invade Norway.

But when Churchill ordered the release

of the British prisoners from the altmark,

Hitler became convinced, somewhat hypocritically,

that britain would do whatever it liked in Norway.

And therefore, Norway was a liability.

Narrator: In April 1940,

Germany invaded Denmark and Norway.

British troops landed in Norway,

but were quickly forced to retreat.

The campaign was considered a grave failure.

On 7 may 1940, in a lengthy debate,

the house of commons discussed the matter.

Prime minister Chamberlain dismissed suggestions

of parallels with the gallipoli campaign

in the first world war.

Churchill was a key player in the Norway debacle,

and claimed complete responsibility,

but the blows of many in the house of commons

were aimed at prime minister Chamberlain.

The opposition argued that the failure in Norway

was representative of other broader failures.

Former conservative cabinet minister, Leo amery,

concluded his speech by demanding

Chamberlain's resignation.

"In the name of god, go."

It was clear his support as leader within government

was floundering.

Destiny was on Churchill's doorstep,

but it was not yet certain.

- There was no inbuilt inevitability about Churchill

replacing Chamberlain in 1940.

In fact, most people assumed that Chamberlain's successor,

from the anti-appeasement point of view,

would be either Anthony Eden, or lord halifax,

who was Chamberlain's foreign secretary.

Narrator: With Anthony Eden out of the picture

due to his resignation from government,

the choice for a successor came down to two men.

Churchill, or lord halifax, and ultimately,

halifax took himself out of contention.

On 10 may 1940,

Chamberlain resigned as prime minister.

At the age of 65,

Churchill had finally met his destiny.

He would lead his nation in war.

The result was not one the public might have expected.

- Churchill was not in the picture for most people.

Mass-observation and the gallop polls,

they both asked these questions -

who most people thought would replace Chamberlain

if, for any reason, he didn't carry on

as war leader.

And the consensus was never that it would be Churchill.

In fact, it was either halifax or Eden

who always won those polls.

Narrator: Churchill may not have been the prime minister

the polls predicted, but in that moment,

he was the man that britain needed.

The nation needed a leader.

Someone who had a plan, who had the vision.

And could convince people that he was sincere

when he said that britain could win.

Narrator: Soon he would confront

ever worsening crises -

the evacuation of dunkirk,

the fall of France, and the battle of britain.

And at his nation's darkest hour,

Churchill turned toward the United States

in the hope of a powerful ally joining the fray.

In 1940, his hour had arrived,

and Churchill was ready and willing

when the bells tolled.

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