The Failure Who Saved Britain

Before the war made him a legend, Winston Churchill was written off as a political failure. He had switched parties twice, taken the blame for the bloody Gallipoli disaster, and spent the 1930s shouting warnings about Hitler that almost no one wanted to hear.

Few expected the finest hour of his life was still ahead.

He became Prime Minister in May 1940, at age sixty-five, just as Britain faced its darkest hour. France was falling. America had not entered the war. Britain stood almost alone.

Churchill's first weapon was not an army. It was words. His job, as he saw it, was to keep a frightened nation from giving up.