MORNING GLORY: Churchill then and now

Some books not only never grow old, they instead grow more relevant to the present day and indeed, even more pressing. 

One such book is The Gathering Storm, the first volume of Winston Churchill’s six-volume history of the Second World War. 

In its preface, Churchill begins by telling the reader that he “must regard these volumes as a continuation of the story of the First World War which I set out in The World Crisis, The Eastern Front, and The Aftermath.”

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“Together,” he continues, “they will cover an account of another Thirty Years War.” 

Churchill does not relate that the first Thirty Years War raged in Central Europe from 1618 until 1648 and claimed up to 8 million lives. Many classify that conflict as a religious war, others a civil war, and most classify it as nothing at all because they have no knowledge of it. But it ravaged Europe so thoroughly as to beggar comparisons…until the titanic struggles of the 20th Century. 

One man had a commanding view of both conflicts from 1914 to 1945 —Churchill. He was part of the highest councils of Great Britain for all but brief periods of both wars. In the First Wold War Churchill was, at its beginning, the civilian head of the United Kingdom’s vast fleet. Except for his six months in the front-line trenches as a Lieutenant Colonel of Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front, Churchill held high offices through the war and for a decade after it. 

He was exiled by his own political party to the political wilderness in 1929 and would stay there for a decade, throughout the rise of Hitler. Churchill was banished for petty reasons by petty rivals throughout the 1930s until finally, when Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, then Prime Minister of Great Britain Neville Chamberlain asked the great man to return to office. 

Chamberlain appointed Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in that fateful September, 1939, in the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of Poland, the same position he had held at the beginning of the First World War. Chamberlain, the architect of the disastrous policy of appeasement of Hitler, had ignored Churchill’s years of warnings about the intentions of “Corporal Hitler.” Churchill returned to a position of power as Hitler rampaged through Poland and prepared for an assault on France. It was not until May 10 of 1940, however, as France’s armies melted away and the British Expeditionary Forces retreated towards Dunkirk, that Chamberlain resigned the post of prime minister as the Parliament and people of the country turned its wrath upon everyone associated with the failed policy of appeasement. 

Churchill was the only serious choice to rally a reeling nation, and he did just that for five years, assuming supreme command of Britain’s war effort from May 10, 1940 until an election after the Allies’ victory in Europe, when a post-VE Day election led to his party’s defeat and his return to the opposition bench on July 26, 1945. That defeat at the polls allowed him the time to write this masterful history, and to do so with the cooperation of a partisan government opposed to his policies but aware of the enormous value such a history would have as the Cold War dawned. 

Five of the six volumes of his history of the Second World War focus primarily on the war from the time Churchill became Prime Minister and, concurrently, minister of Defense. 

But the first volume reviews the critical years from 1919 through the fall of France in the spring of 1940 and Churchill’s rise to leadership. The greatest man of the century was 65 when he took over a disastrous situation, one that he had warned against for a decade. He was 70 when the voters expelled him, and 76 when he led his party to victory again and became Prime Minister again, and served in that office until he was 80. 

Churchill wrote 43 books that span 72 volumes, and at the risk of upsetting Churchill scholars, I think The Gathering Storm is the most important of all his many great works, at least for readers in 2025. (The scholars will point to his magisterial “Marlborough” as his greatest literary achievement, but I’m sticking with my pick.) 

A hundred years ago —in 1925– Churchill had written an essay to which he refers in Chapter 3 of The Gathering Storm, a column that asked “Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of building—nay, to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?”

In the same column he warned that “[a]s for poison gas and chemical warfare in all its forms, only the first chapter has been written in a terrible book.” 

The great leader of countries at war was thus also a prophet of the terrible future of war, and so eloquent a writer that he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. 

Because of his first-row center seat to the rise of the Nazis, though without power to do anything except orate, detailed unheeded warnings from the back benches of Parliament, because of his leading role in the dramas of the actual combat of last century and because of his gift for writing, I recommend every serious person order the The Gathering Storm and read it. 

I’ve begun it again now in order to discuss it on air with Dr. Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, and the equal of any Churchill scholar living. The first of our conversations about The Gathering Storm is here. The second here. Dr. Arnn is as good a guide as can be found, but his commentaries are a prompt not a summary. This is a book you ought to read. 

Because “The Gathering Storm” is about today as much as it is about 1919-1940, about the innocence and indifference of a country worn out by war and wanting very much to be done with it, refusing for two decades to believe that war might not be over. 

It is prophet’s testimony about prophecies ignored, and about the disaster that followed that need not have happened at all. 

The United States did not fall into complacency after World War II, but gathered its strength and rebuilt the West while holding the Soviet Union at bay. It took a holiday from history in the 1990s, and 9/11 was the price. President George W. Bush oversaw the rebuilding and deployment of the American military and victory was achieved at great cost in both Afghanistan and Iraq, only to be thrown away by President Biden in the former instance and President Obama in the latter. Now the entire Democratic Party has succumbed to a sort of thinly disguised pacifism wrapped in a ridiculous wokeism and only President Trump’s bold decision to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program stopped a theocracy administered by fanatics from acquiring the fateful “bomb the size of an orange” that Churchill warned about. 

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Now President Trump is attempting to both broker peace in Central Europe and rebuild our hollowed-out military. Incredibly, much of legacy media appears to hope he fails in the former effort lest his position in history as a peacemaker be secured even against the libels of the TDS-afflicted. 

If you have any doubt about the urgent need for him to succeed and for the GOP to remain in control of Congress for the foreseeable future, read The Gathering Storm and keep up with Dr. Arnn’s commentaries. The world isn’t growing less dangerous, only more so. A Third World War would be as to the First and Second as those two wars were to the Thirty Years War: Destruction and death on an exponential scale with no Marshall Plan available after the war with which to rebuild. Every country would go down swinging. The battlefields of Ukraine tell us that. 

If you can’t get past your dislike of the president, you ought to be first in line at the used book store on Amazon to pick up the volume. It may clear your head. It is not a time for absurd policies and silly alarms about “fascism” at home. There are totalitarians enough abroad who wish us all evil, whether we are “red” or “blue.” Americans ought to worry about the new “Gathering Storm” and act together to prevent it, not repeat the mistakes of Great Britain in the “peace” between the world wars of the 20th century. 

Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990.  Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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