How Surrender Leads to Victory

A raging, vengeful spirit of war had descended upon Europe. The year was 1941, and already Adolf Hitler and his Nazi forces had invaded Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, and Russia. France had fallen. Bombs were devastating London.

The free nations of the world were in peril, and Winston Churchill knew he needed God.

In August of that year, he sailed to an appointed anchorage off the coast of Newfoundland for his first wartime meeting with US President Franklin Roosevelt. Aboard ships tossed by churning seas, the two men talked of tactics and resources, studied maps by the hour, and devised strategies to answer the rising tide of evil. Yet Churchill understood better than most that far more would be needed to stand down the gigantic and even supernatural forces at work.

Churchill had first awakened to spiritual things at the knee of his nanny, Elizabeth Everest. Though his parents often treated him as a pest to be endured — Churchill’s son, Randolph Churchill, once wrote that "the neglect and lack of interest in him shown by his parents were remarkable, even judged by the standards of late Victorian and Edwardian days” — his nanny loved him as her own. A devoted Christian, she sensed destiny swirling around young Winston, and took it upon herself to teach him the ways of God — scripture, hymns, the duties of a righteous man, and a distinctly biblical view of the world.[1]

This changed Churchill, yet later in life he nearly lost his grasp upon all that Elizabeth Everest had taught him. As a young British Army officer on the Indian frontier, he began reading rationalist philosophers who criticized Christianity and argued against its every claim. Churchill was seduced by this skepticism and slowly laid aside the faith of his youth.

A turn came when as a journalist traveling with British troops during the Boer War in South Africa, Churchill was captured and held at a Boer prison camp. In a move that would catapult him to world fame, he escaped and exhaustingly worked his way through jungles and enemy lines to freedom. Along the way, he found himself returning to God, recovering all that Elizabeth Everest had embedded in his soul. As he afterward wrote of this time,

I found no comfort in any of the philosophical ideas which some men parade in their hours of ease and strength and safety. They seem only fair-weather friends. I realized with awful force that no exercise of my own feeble wit and strength could save me from my enemies, and that without the assistance of that High Power which interferes in the eternal sequence of causes and effects more often than we are always prone to admit, I could never succeed. I prayed long and earnestly for help and guidance. My prayer, as it seems to me, was swiftly and wonderfully answered.[2]

Years later then, in 1941, as Europe was making itself a rubble, Churchill did not forget his God. He understood that natural forces alone would not win the day. He was certain that a “High Power” would have to grant favor to the “Christian nations,” as he called them, if the “darkest paganism” of Nazism were to be defeated.

Thus, when the strategy sessions were finished aboard those tossed ships floating off the coast of Newfoundland, Churchill asked President Roosevelt to join him in seeking God. On Sunday, August 10, the Prime Minister of England welcomed the President of the United States aboard the HMS Prince of Wales. With them were a hundred or more staff officers and representatives of both nations who gathered on the quarterdeck for “Divine Service.” A pulpit was draped with both the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack. Chaplains prayed. Common sailors shared prayer books with admirals. Hymns which most of those gathered had known their whole lives were sung with deep feeling and more than a little desperation.

Churchill took particular joy in the hymns. He later explained the reason: “I chose the hymns myself — 'For Those in Peril on the Sea’ and ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers.’ We ended with ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past.’ Every word seemed to stir the heart. It was a great hour to live. Nearly half of those who sang were soon to die.”[3]

So it was that before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, before the demonic secrets of concentration camps revealed themselves, and before the hellish years gave way to victory, Churchill called the leaders of the West to entrust their fate to the God who determines the outcomes of wars. He had called the “Christian nations” to surrender to their God that they might never be forced to surrender to their enemies.

And victory came.

An excerpt from the forthcoming piece Surrender: An Art of Manhood, Kinsmen Journal, Volume 1, by Stephen Mansfield.

[1]Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: Youth, 1874-1900 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966), p.  43.

[2] Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life, (London: Oldhams Books Limited, 1930), p. 273.

[3] Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance, The Second World War, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), p. 432.