Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955

A flashlight revealed the stairs to the concrete underground air-raid shelter. Pools of stagnant water made the steps slippery. For an old man, uneasy on his feet, the descent was treacherous. Late in the afternoon on 16 July 1945, Britain’s seventy-year-old wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, picked his way with a gold-headed walking stick to the dark, dank bunker where Adolf Hitler had put a bullet into his right temple two and a half months before.

Word had spread quickly that Churchill was in Berlin. By the time his convoy reached the Reich Chancellery, the small British party had swelled to a jostling mob as war correspondents and numerous Russian officers and officials pressed forward to join Churchill’s entourage. Anxious to witness the final scene of one of history’s greatest dramas, they followed the Prime Minister, who wore a lightweight military uniform and visored cap, into the sacked remains of the Chancellery and, later, out to the garden where the entrance to the bunker was located.

In one of his most famous wartime broadcasts, Churchill had said, ‘We have but one aim and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us. Nothing.’ Now, the reporters hoped for a curtain speech from this master of the spoken word as he inspected the tangible evidence of his triumph. He had been fighting his way here in one way or another for more than a decade, and a statement from him would provide a thrilling end to the story.

Churchill had been a lonely voice in the wilderness during most of the 1930s, when his warnings about Hitler had gone unheeded. In 1940, Britain was already at war when he was called to serve as Prime Minister. Against seemingly impossible odds, at a time when France had fallen and Hitler’s armies had overrun the Continent, Churchill led Britain as it fought alone. While Nazi bombs rained on London and Hitler boasted that he had crushed the panic-stricken British in their holes, Churchill’s flights of oratory rallied his countrymen and offered hope that their plight might yet be reversed. After the Russians and then the Americans joined the fight on Britain’s side, Churchill battled the ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’ – as he referred to Hitler – for an additional four years.

By the end of the war in Europe, Churchill had accomplished what many people had once believed he could never do. At home in Britain, even long-time detractors agreed that he had saved the country. His personal story was all the more remarkable because he had spent so much of his adult life in political disrepute. The road to the premiership had been long, ‘and every foot of it contested’. Frustration, exclusion, and isolation had often been his lot before he became Prime Minister when he was sixty-five, an age that qualified him to draw an old-age pension.

The man who visited Hitler’s bunker had recast himself in just five years as one of history’s titans. Had Churchill died before 1940, he might have been remembered as a prodigiously gifted failure. On this day, he was at the apex of his glory. Yet thus far, he had appeared oddly detached and distracted. His bulbous, bloodshot, light blue eyes surveyed the devastation at the Chancellery, and he quietly asked a few questions of the Russian soldier who served as his guide, but he made no public comment. Finally, Churchill left reporters outside the bunker entrance as he followed the Russian soldier into the blackness.

He slowly made his way down the first flight of stone steps towards the chamber where Hitler’s body had been discovered, slumped over a sofa beside the lifeless form of his bride, Eva Braun, her lips puckered and blue from poison. Churchill hesitated when the Russian told him that two additional water-soaked flights remained. As if it were no longer worth the effort, he abandoned the tour without having seen for himself the site of his mortal enemy’s suicide. Churchill sent the others in his party, which included his youngest daughter, Mary, to view it without him. Then he turned and slowly began to make his way back up.