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"I certify that I received the remains, supervised cremation, and personally scattered the ashes of the following executed war criminals at sea from an Eighth Army liaison plane," US Army Maj Luther Frierson wrote in one documents dated 23 December 1948 - the day Tojo and six others convicted.

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World War Two: Hideki Tojo's ashes scattered by US, documents reveal

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"I certify that I received the remains, supervised cremation, and personally scattered the ashes of the following executed war criminals at sea from an Eighth Army liaison plane," US Army Maj Luther Frierson wrote in one documents dated 23 December 1948 - the day Tojo and six others convicted.

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In March 1937, he was promoted to chief of staff of the Kwantung Army whereby he led military operations against the Chinese in Inner Mongolia and the Chahar-Suiyan provinces. By July 1940, he was appointed minister of war to the Japanese government led by Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe.

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He vocally supported Japanese expansion and a pre-emptive attack on the US and European colonial powers

As prime minister, he oversaw Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 - the event which brought the US into WW2 - and his country's conquests in South East Asia and the Pacific

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General of the Japanese military, later becomes Prime Minister of Japan during WW2.

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Before the onset of the Great Depression in Germany in 1929-1930, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi Party for short) was a small party on the radical right of the German political spectrum. In the Reichstag (parliament) elections of May 2, 1928, the Nazis received only 2.6 percent of the national vote, a proportionate decline from 1924, when the Nazis received 3 percent of the vote. As a result of the election, a "Grand Coalition" of Germany's Social Democratic, Catholic Center, German Democratic, and German People's parties governed Weimar Germany into the first six months of the economic downturn.

During 1930-1933, the mood in Germany was grim. The worldwide economic depression had hit the country hard, and millions of people were out of work. The unemployed were joined by millions of others who linked the Depression to Germany's national humiliation after defeat in World War 1. Many Germans perceived the parliamentary government coalition as weak and unable to alleviate the economic crisis. Widespread economic misery, fear, and perception of worse times to come, as well as anger and impatience with the apparent failure of the government to manage the crisis, offered fertile ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

Hitler was a powerful and spellbinding orator who, by tapping into the anger and helplessness felt by a large number of voters, attracted a wide following of Germans desperate for change. Nazi electoral propaganda promised to pull Germany out of the Depression. The Nazis pledged to restore German cultural values, reverse the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, turn back the perceived threat of a Communist uprising, put the German people back to work, and restore Germany to its "rightful position" as a world power. Hitler and other Nazi propagandists were highly successful in directing the population's anger and fear against the Jews; against the Marxists (Communists and Social Democrats); and against those the Nazis held responsible for signing both the armistice of November 1918 and the Versailles treaty, and for establishing the parliamentary republic. Hitler and the Nazis often referred to the latter as "November criminals."

Hitler and other Nazi speakers carefully tailored their speeches to each audience. For example, when speaking to businessmen, the Nazis downplayed antisemitism and instead emphasized anti-communism and the return of German colonies lost through the Treaty of Versailles. When addressed to soldiers, veterans, or other nationalist interest groups, Nazi propaganda emphasized military buildup and return of other territories lost after Versailles. Nazi speakers assured farmers in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein that a Nazi government would prop up falling agricultural prices. Pensioners all over Germany were told that both the amounts and the buying power of their monthly checks would remain stable.

Using a deadlock among the partners in the "Grand Coalition" as an excuse, Center party politician and Reich Chancellor Heinrich Bruening induced the aging Reich President, World War I Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, to dissolve the parliament in July 1930 and schedule new elections for September 1930. To dissolve the parliament, the president used Article 48 of the German constitution. This Article permitted the German government to govern without parliamentary consent and was to be applied only in cases of direct national emergency.

Bruening miscalculated the mood of the nation after six months of economic depression. The Nazis won 18.3 percent of the vote and became the second largest political party in the country.

For two years, repeatedly resorting to Article 48 to issue presidential decrees, the Bruening government sought and failed to build a parliamentary majority that would exclude Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis. In 1932, Hindenburg dismissed Bruening and appointed Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and Center party politician, as chancellor. Papen dissolved the Reichstag again, but the July 1932 elections brought the Nazi party 37.3 percent of the popular vote, making it the largest political party in Germany. The Communists (taking votes from the Social Democrats in the increasingly desperate economic climate) received 14.3 percent of the vote. As a result, more than half the deputies in the 1932 Reichstag had publicly committed themselves to ending parliamentary democracy.

When Papen was unable to obtain a parliamentary majority to govern, his opponents among President Hindenburg's advisers forced him to resign. His successor, General Kurt von Schleicher, dissolved the Reichstag again. In the ensuing elections in November 1932, the Nazis lost ground, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. The Communists, however gained votes, winning 16.9 percent. As a result, the small circle around President Hindenburg came to believe, by the end of 1932, that the Nazi party was Germany's only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. Nazi negotiators and propagandists did much to enhance this impression.

On January 30, 1933, President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hitler was not appointed chancellor as the result of an electoral victory with a popular mandate, but instead as the result of a constitutionally questionable deal among a small group of conservative German politicians who had given up on parliamentary rule. They hoped to use Hitler's popularity with the masses to buttress a return to conservative authoritarian rule, perhaps even a monarchy. Within two years, however, Hitler and the Nazis outmaneuvered Germany's conservative politicians to consolidate a radical Nazi dictatorship completely subordinate to Hitler's personal will.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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The Nazi Party was one of a number of right-wing extremist political groups that emerged in Germany following World War I. Learn about the Nazi rise to power.

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He expanded the army tremendously, reintroduced conscription, and began developing a new air force—all violations of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler's military spending and ambitious public-works programs, including building a German autobahn, helped restore prosperity.

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-Hitler's rise to power was completed in August 1934 when President Paul von Hindenburg died. Hitler merged the Chancellorship with the Presidency and became the Führer of Germany.
-Widespread economic misery, fear, and perception of worse times to come, as well as anger and impatience with the apparent failure of the government to manage the crisis, offered fertile ground for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

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Leader of Nazi Germany during WW2

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How Mussolini Seized Power in Italy—And Turned It Into a Fascist State

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Mussolini, who coined the term fascism, crushed opposition with violence and projected an image of himself as a powerful, indispensable leader.

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Mussolini, fearful of being handed over, was instead rescued by Hitler's forces.

Transported to German-occupied northern Italy, he was installed as Hitler's puppet leader, creating the Italian Social Republic and leading to the extermination of thousands of Italian Jews.

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Italy's King, Victor Emmanuel III, refused to declare a state of emergency and impose martial law. Instead he dissolved the government and asked Mussolini to form a new one. Mussolini became both prime minister and interior minister, the latter post, critically, giving him control over the police.

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Fascist Dictator of Italy

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During World War II Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the belligerent nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler alliance with the Western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin World War II. Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but palpably treacherous German ally was still engaged in the West, Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In May 1941 Stalin recognized the growing danger of German attack on the Soviet Union by appointing himself chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental office since 1923.

Yalta Conference Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives

Study how Stalin's Soviet Union employed scorched-earth tactics against German troops on the Eastern Front Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. See all videos for this article

Examine how Stalin's Red Army defeated Hitler's Fourth and Sixth armies in the Battle of Stalingrad Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. See all videos for this article

Stalin's prewar defensive measures were exposed as incompetent by the German blitzkrieg that surged deep into Soviet territory after Hitler's unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union of June 22, 1941. Khrushchev claimed that Stalin was shocked into temporary inactivity by the onslaught, but, if so, he soon rallied and appointed himself supreme commander in chief. When the Germans menaced Moscow in the winter of 1941, he remained in the threatened capital, helping to organize a great counter-offensive. The Battle of Stalingrad (in the following winter) and the Battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were also won by the Soviet Army under Stalin's supreme direction, turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945. As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as Hitler did, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.

Learn about the Potsdam Conference attended by Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin to decide the future of Germany and Europe after WWII Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, Mainz See all videos for this article

Stalin participated in high-level Allied meetings, including those of the "Big Three" with Churchill and Roosevelt at Tehrān (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945). A formidable negotiator, he outwitted these foreign statesmen; his superior skill has been acclaimed by Anthony Eden, then British foreign secretary.

Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Last years

After the war, Stalin imposed on eastern Europe a new kind of colonial control based on native Communist regimes nominally independent but in fact subservient to himself. He thus increased the number of his subjects by about a hundred million. But in 1948 the defection of Titoist Yugoslavia from the Soviet camp struck a severe blow to world Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent other client states from following Tito's example, Stalin instigated local show trials, manipulated like those of the Great Purge of the 1930s in Russia, in which satellite Communist leaders confessed to Titoism, many being executed.

Far from continuing his wartime alliance with the United States and Great Britain, Stalin now regarded these countries-and especially the United States-as the arch-enemies that he needed after Hitler's death. At home, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted. Stalin's chief ideological hatchet man, Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field was asserted. Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed.

Increasingly suspicious and paranoid in his later years, Stalin ordered the arrest, announced in January 1953, of certain-mostly Jewish- Kremlin doctors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently preparing to make this " Doctors' Plot " the pretext for yet another great terror menacing all his senior associates, but he died suddenly on March 5, according to the official report; so convenient was this death to his entourage that suspicions of foul play were voiced.

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Joseph Stalin - Joseph Stalin - Role in World War II: During World War II Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the belligerent nations.

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As war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy.

At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as Hitler did, the Soviet generalissimo gradually learned to delegate military decisions.

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In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler alliance with the Western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin World War II.

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Leader of Communist Russia during WW2

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Table of Contents

1. FDR 'Bends' Neutrality Laws at the Canadian Border

2. 'Cash and Carry' Arms Sales to Britain and France

3. Lend-Lease Program Opens Floodgates of U.S. War Aid

By the mid-1930s, the rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in Germany threatened to engulf Europe into another world war. The United States, meanwhile, had taken an isolationist turn, with Americans refusing to send more young men to die on foreign battlefields. More than 100,000 U.S. troops were killed in World War I, sacrifices that many Americans believed were made in order to stuff the pockets of the U.S. arms industry.

When Hitler marched into neighboring Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland, it prompted joint declarations of war from two of America's closest allies, Great Britain and France. But the U.S. remained stubbornly neutral, bound by Congress not to lend aid or assistance to any "belligerents" in the European conflict.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood, though, that the best way to keep American troops out of World War II was to help the British and French defeat Hitler without us. That required money, munitions and equipment-foreign aid that was explicitly banned by the Neutrality Acts.

Through a series of savvy political maneuvers, FDR was able to work around the isolationists in Congress and find ways for America to contribute to the war effort long before December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States off the sidelines and officially into the war.

FDR 'Bends' Neutrality Laws at the Canadian Border

Congress passed the first Neutrality Act in 1935, barring the export of "arms, ammunition, and implements of war" to any foreign nation at war. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, isolationists in Congress amended the Neutrality Acts in 1937 to include even more restrictions on foreign aid and civilian involvement in overseas conflicts.

"Roosevelt didn't like the neutrality legislation," saysWarren Kimball, an emeritus history professor at Rutgers University and author of Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War. "He saw the direction things were going in Europe and it took away his ability to act."

In 1939, Hitler defied the 1938 Munich Agreement -which Britain and France hoped would appease Hitler's imperialist urges-and invaded Czechoslovakia, making a wider war with France and Great Britain all but inevitable.

"From that point, Roosevelt began to gently but firmly bend the rules of neutrality," says Kimball. "He and his people found legal ways to get weapons to the French, but it took some creativity."

Under the Neutrality Acts, for example, war planes could not be flown out of the United States for sale to foreign governments. So the FDR administration quietly came up with a solution. They flew some World War I-era planes to the Canadian border, parked them a few feet from a border crossing, and let the Canadian authorities tow the planes over the border with ropes.

'Cash and Carry' Arms Sales to Britain and France

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland in a direct provocation to Britain and France, who immediately declared war on Germany. FDR knew that it would take more than sneaking a few planes over the Canadian border to keep the United States out of this war, so he persuaded Congress to amend the Neutrality Acts to allow for the unrestricted sale of supplies and weapons to European allies on a "cash and carry" basis.

Cash and carry meant that foreign governments could buy American-made munitions and airplanes, but they had to pay cash and they had to transport the equipment on their own ships. American politicians didn't want a repeat of what had happened in World War I.

"Some Americans were 'traumatized,' if you will, by the fact that our World War I allies had borrowed a lot of money from the U.S. to buy weapons and food, and never paid it back," says Kimball. "And they also wanted to avoid the problem of American ships carrying war materials across the ocean. After all, the sinking of the Lusitania -a British ship carrying American passengers-was one of the events that had pulled the United States into World War I."

Just three days after the Neutrality Act was amended to allow cash and carry sales, the British government set up the British Purchasing Commission in New York City to expedite sales of American-made munitions for immediate export to Europe.

Lend-Lease Program Opens Floodgates of U.S. War Aid

The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill took office in 1940 and watched with horror as the Nazis invaded and occupied France in a matter of weeks. Britain was now fighting Germany essentially on its own, and it seemed very possible that Adolf Hitler would win.

Churchill wrote FDR requesting a "loan" of 50 American naval destroyers, but Roosevelt knew that Congress would never approve it. So FDR's attorney general came up with a creative legal workaround that allowed the president to send the ships using an executive action. In what's known as the " destroyers-for-bases deal," FDR traded the World War I-era destroyers in exchange for 99-year leases on some British bases in the Western Hemisphere.

By December of 1940, as the British were pounded by nightly German bombing attacks, Churchill wrote FDR again saying that "[t]he moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies."

With the situation increasingly dire for Britain, FDR and his treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau responded with yet another scheme called "lend-lease." Instead of acting alone, Roosevelt tried to persuade Congress to loan war material to the British with the hope, but not the assurance, that it would be paid back. In a press conference, FDR compared it to lending a hose to a neighbor whose house is on fire. You might not get the hose back, but at least your house didn't burn down, too.

Congress, sensing that it could be America's last chance to stay out of the war, overcame isolationist opposition and passed the Lend-Lease Act (subtitled "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States") in the spring of 1941, creating the Office of Lend-Lease Administration.

As part of the debates in Congress, some Senators wanted to explicitly block the Soviet Union from receiving any Lend-Lease aid, but Kimball says that FDR's supporters "presciently" struck that language. The allies may have never defeated Hitler without the Soviet Union, and the Soviets depended heavily on Lend-Lease aid in the form of raw metals, explosives and fuel.

Winston Churchill famously called the Lend-Lease program ( not the Marshall Plan) "the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history."

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How Was the US Involved in WWII Before Pearl Harbor? | HISTORY

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Before formally entering World War II, FDR came up with a few key strategies to provide critical aid to allies in Europe in the fight against Hitler's Nazi Party.

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Roosevelt built a powerful wartime coalition with Britain and the Soviet Union, and led the nation to victory against Nazi Germany.

His wartime efforts prepared the path for his successor, Harry Truman, to win the war against Japan four months after his death.

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Through a series of savvy political maneuvers, FDR was able to work around the isolationists in Congress and find ways for America to contribute to the war effort long before December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States off the sidelines and officially into the war.

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President of the United States of America

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Following Neville Chamberlain’s resignation in 1940, Churchill was chosen to succeed him as Prime Minister of an all-party coalition government.

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Winston Churchill rallied the British people and led the country from the brink of defeat to victory

He shaped Allied strategy in the war, and in the war’s later stages he alerted the West to the expansionist threat of the Soviet Union.

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Table of Contents

What did Winston Churchill do during World War II?

What was Winston Churchill's family background?

Where was Winston Churchill educated?

Read a brief summary of this topic

Winston Churchill, in full Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, (born November 30, 1874, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England-died January 24, 1965, London), British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940-45, 1951-55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory.

After a sensational rise to prominence in national politics before World War I, Churchill acquired a reputation for erratic judgment in the war itself and in the decade that followed. Politically suspect in consequence, he was a lonely figure until his response to Adolf Hitler's challenge brought him to leadership of a national coalition in 1940. With Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin he then shaped Allied strategy in World War II, and after the breakdown of the alliance he alerted the West to the expansionist threat of the Soviet Union. He led the Conservative Party back to office in 1951 and remained prime minister until 1955, when ill health forced his resignation.

In Churchill's veins ran the blood of both of the English-speaking peoples whose unity, in peace and war, it was to be a constant purpose of his to promote. Through his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the meteoric Tory politician, he was directly descended from John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, the hero of the wars against Louis XIV of France in the early 18th century. His mother, Jennie Jerome, a noted beauty, was the daughter of a New York financier and horse racing enthusiast, Leonard W. Jerome.

The young Churchill passed an unhappy and sadly neglected childhood, redeemed only by the affection of Mrs. Everest, his devoted nurse. At Harrow his conspicuously poor academic record seemingly justified his father's decision to enter him into an army career. It was only at the third attempt that he managed to pass the entrance examination to the Royal Military College, now Academy, Sandhurst, but, once there, he applied himself seriously and passed out (graduated) 20th in a class of 130. In 1895, the year of his father's tragic death, he entered the 4th Hussars. Initially the only prospect of action was in Cuba, where he spent a couple of months of leave reporting the Cuban war of independence from Spain for the Daily Graphic (London). In 1896 his regiment went to India, where he saw service as both soldier and journalist on the North-West Frontier (1897). Expanded as The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), his dispatches attracted such wide attention as to launch him on the career of authorship that he intermittently pursued throughout his life. In 1897-98 he wrote Savrola (1900), a Ruritanian romance, and got himself attached to Lord Kitchener's Nile expeditionary force in the same dual role of soldier and correspondent. The River War (1899) brilliantly describes the campaign.

Political career before 1939

The five years after Sandhurst saw Churchill's interests expand and mature. He relieved the tedium of army life in India by a program of reading designed to repair the deficiencies of Harrow and Sandhurst, and in 1899 he resigned his commission to enter politics and make a living by his pen. He first stood as a Conservative at Oldham, where he lost a by-election by a narrow margin, but found quick solace in reporting the South African War for The Morning Post ( London). Within a month after his arrival in South Africa he had won fame for his part in rescuing an armoured train ambushed by Boers, though at the price of himself being taken prisoner. But this fame was redoubled when less than a month later he escaped from military prison. Returning to Britain a military hero, he laid siege again to Oldham in the election of 1900. Churchill succeeded in winning by a margin as narrow as that of his previous failure. But he was now in Parliament and, fortified by the £10,000 his writings and lecture tours had earned for him, was in a position to make his own way in politics.

A self-assurance redeemed from arrogance only by a kind of boyish charm made Churchill from the first a notable House of Commons figure, but a speech defect, which he never wholly lost, combined with a certain psychological inhibition to prevent him from immediately becoming a master of debate. He excelled in the set speech, on which he always spent enormous pains, rather than in the impromptu; Lord Balfour, the Conservative leader, said of him that he carried "heavy but not very mobile guns." In matter as in style he modeled himself on his father, as his admirable biography, Lord Randolph Churchill (1906; revised edition 1952), makes evident, and from the first he wore his Toryism with a difference, advocating a fair, negotiated peace for the Boers and deploring military mismanagement and extravagance.

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As Liberal minister

In 1904 the Conservative government found itself impaled on a dilemma by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain's open advocacy of a tariff. Churchill, a convinced free trader, helped to found the Free Food League. He was disavowed by his constituents and became increasingly alienated from his party. In 1904 he joined the Liberals and won renown for the audacity of his attacks on Chamberlain and Balfour. The radical elements in his political makeup came to the surface under the influence of two colleagues in particular, John Morley, a political legatee of W.E. Gladstone, and David Lloyd George, the rising Welsh orator and firebrand. In the ensuing general election in 1906 he secured a notable victory in Manchester and began his ministerial career in the new Liberal government as undersecretary of state for the colonies. He soon gained credit for his able defense of the policy of conciliation and self-government in South Africa. When the ministry was reconstructed under Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith in 1908, Churchill was promoted to president of the Board of Trade, with a seat in the cabinet. Defeated at the ensuing by-election in Manchester, he won an election at Dundee. In the same year he married the beautiful Clementine Hozier; it was a marriage of unbroken affection that provided a secure and happy background for his turbulent career.

At the Board of Trade, Churchill emerged as a leader in the movement of Liberalism away from laissez-faire toward social reform. He completed the work begun by his predecessor, Lloyd George, on the bill imposing an eight-hour maximum day for miners. He himself was responsible for attacking the evils of "sweated" labour by setting up trade boards with power to fix minimum wages and for combating unemployment by instituting state-run labour exchanges.

When this Liberal program necessitated high taxation, which in turn provoked the House of Lords to the revolutionary step of rejecting the budget of 1909, Churchill was Lloyd George's closest ally in developing the provocative strategy designed to clip the wings of the upper chamber. Churchill became president of the Budget League, and his oratorical broadsides at the House of Lords were as lively and devastating as Lloyd George's own. Indeed Churchill, as an alleged traitor to his class, earned the lion's share of Tory animosity. His campaigning in the two general elections of 1910 and in the House of Commons during the passage of the Parliament Act of 1911, which curbed the House of Lords' powers, won him wide popular acclaim. In the cabinet his reward was promotion to the office of home secretary. Here, despite substantial achievements in prison reform, he had to devote himself principally to coping with a sweeping wave of industrial unrest and violent strikes. Upon occasion his relish for dramatic action led him beyond the limits of his proper role as the guarantor of public order. For this he paid a heavy price in incurring the long-standing suspicion of organized labour.

In 1911 the provocative German action in sending a gunboat to Agadir, the Moroccan port to which France had claims, convinced Churchill that in any major Franco-German conflict Britain would have to be at France's side. When transferred to the Admiralty in October 1911, he went to work with a conviction of the need to bring the navy to a pitch of instant readiness. His first task was the creation of a naval war staff. To help Britain's lead over steadily mounting German naval power, Churchill successfully campaigned in the cabinet for the largest naval expenditure in British history. Despite his inherited Tory views on Ireland, he wholeheartedly embraced the Liberal policy of Home Rule, moving the second reading of the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1912 and campaigning for it in the teeth of Unionist opposition. Although, through his friendship with F.E. Smith (later 1st earl of Birkenhead) and Austen Chamberlain, he did much to arrange the compromise by which Ulster was to be excluded from the immediate effect of the bill, no member of the government was more bitterly abused-by Tories as a renegade and by extreme Home Rulers as a defector.

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Winston Churchill | Biography, World War II, Quotes, Books, & Facts

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Winston Churchill, in full Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, (born November 30, 1874, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England-died January 24, 1965, London), British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940-45, 1951-55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory.

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Prime Minister of Britain