Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British leader who guided Great Britain and the Allies through the crisis of World War II, is born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England.
Churchill
came from a prestigious family with a long history of military service
and joined the British Fourth Hussars upon his father's death in 1895.
During the next five years, he enjoyed an illustrious military career,
serving in India, the Sudan, and South Africa, and distinguishing
himself several times in battle. In 1899, he resigned his commission to
concentrate on his literary and political career and in 1900 was elected
to Parliament as a Conservative MP from Oldham. In 1904, he joined the
Liberals, serving in a number of important posts before being appointed
Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, where he worked to bring
the British navy to a readiness for the war he foresaw.
In 1915, in the second year of World War I,
Churchill was held responsible for the disastrous Dardanelles and
Gallipoli campaigns, and he was excluded from the war coalition
government. He resigned and volunteered to command an infantry battalion
in France. However, in 1917, he returned to politics as a cabinet
member in the Liberal government of Lloyd George. From 1919 to 1921, he
was secretary of state for war and in 1924 returned to the Conservative
Party, where two years later he played a leading role in the defeat of
the General Strike of 1926. Out of office from 1929 to 1939, Churchill
issued unheeded warnings of the threat of German and Japanese
aggression.
After the outbreak of World War II in Europe,
Churchill was called back to his post as First Lord of the Admiralty and
eight months later replaced the ineffectual Neville Chamberlain as
prime minister of a new coalition government. In the first year of his
administration, Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany,
but Churchill promised his country and the world that the British
people would "never surrender." He rallied the British people to a
resolute resistance and expertly orchestrated Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin into an alliance that eventually crushed the Axis.
Taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/winston-churchill-born [26.11.2012]
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