The date is burned into the memory of every Briton old enough to have understood its significance. Churchill’s daughter, Mary, was at the family home, Chartwell, and remembers hearing the news announced on the BBC. She prayed. His confidant, Major General Edward Spears, heard the Berlin wireless announce Britain’s change of government. “Mr. Chamberlain has resigned and is followed by Winston Churchill . . . [the] most brutal representative of the policy of force, the man whose programme is to dismember Germany, this man whose hateful face is well known to all Germans.”

Shortly, the rest of the world learned that Britain’s leadership had changed on one of the most fateful days in the history of Western civilization. As for Winston Churchill, May 10, 1940, now meant simply that, for better or worse, Britain’s fate rested in his hands. Historian A.J.P. Taylor would later write of him, that when Britain needed him the most he became “the saviour of his country.”

Indeed, someone like Gen. George S. Patton would have brusquely declared that what Britain needed in 1940 was a confident, indisputable son-of-a-bitch to take charge; someone unafraid to make the difficult life-and-death decisions that befall a war leader; to take charge of a nation in a state of disbelief that it was again at war—a war that was not supposed to occur after the terrible sacrifice of the “war to end all wars.” For all of his many admirable qualities, the only other candidate for prime minister, foreign secretary Lord Halifax, was not a war leader of the ilk required to defeat Adolf Hitler. On May 10, 1940, just such an S.O.B. as Patton might have wished for took charge of Britain’s fate when the responsibility to lead the nation was thrust upon Winston Churchill who would later remark that, “Some people pretend to regard me as The British Lion. But I am not the Lion. I am simply the Roar of the Lion.”

George Orwell and Churchill’s personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), may have spoken for Britain of what Churchill would come to epitomize. Orwell has observed that Britain finally had “a leader who understood ‘that wars are won by fighting,’” while Wilson wrote that what the nation required “was a man utterly blind to reason, a man who refused to see the sound and compelling reasons for despair and surrender.”

The man who had just become prime minister at the moment of the gravest crisis in British history was never in the best of health, smoked way too much, was thought to drink too much, and had been a political outcast for nearly a decade. Now, this controversial man, who many thought dangerously unfit to lead Britain, was suddenly charged with the most profound burden ever placed upon the shoulders of a leader. Churchill finally went to bed around 3:00 a.m. and when he arose the following morning said to Clementine: "Only Hitler can turn me out of this job.”

No one did until the summer of 1945. As for a formal ceremony to mark Churchill’s new role, it would have been out of place and unseemly for a nation to rejoice on a day when the future of the British nation was bleak and about to get even bleaker.

Portions of this article appear in the author’s Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945, published by HarperCollins and in April 2009 in the United Kingdom by Allen Land/Penguin.

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