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For students and historians of the Cold War, the Churchill Archive is a treasure trove of primary sources. Although first and foremost a collection of materials concerned with the life and career of Winston Churchill, the archive also functions as a window into the times in which he lived. As Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1940 to 1945, Churchill was a key participant in the events that historians agree were the principal staging posts in the origins of what became the Cold War, notably the Big Three wartime conferences at Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam.
Voted out of office in the July 1945 British General Election, Churchill spent the next six years in opposition. However, as the most famous statesman in the world, he was never far from the centre of international affairs – most famously at Fulton, Missouri, in March 1946, when his ‘iron curtain’ speech warned of the onset of the Cold War and urged the coming together of the free world under US leadership to resist Soviet expansionism. Within a year, the Cold War itself had begun and the United States, through the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and a little later NATO, had taken up the mantle of Western leadership. As such, the ‘iron curtain’ speech came to be seen as an inspired prophecy and Churchill gained – and never really lost – a reputation for being the original Cold Warrior.
By the time that Churchill returned to power in Britain in 1951, the Cold War had become overshadowed by the expanding nuclear arsenals of the USA and the USSR. Conscious of the UK’s vulnerability to attack by Soviet bombers with nuclear payloads if the Cold War ever degenerated into hot war, Churchill hoped to arrange an East–West summit at which the two sides might map out a basis for peaceful coexistence. The emergence in 1953–4 of the calamitous hydrogen bomb – a weapon hundreds and potentially thousands of times more powerful than the atomic bombs used against Japan in 1945 – so frightened Churchill that he promptly elevated détente from the status of aspiration to vital necessity. The first step remained a summit but age and infirmity eventually caught up with him and he bowed out as Prime Minister, aged eighty, in April 1955, having failed to realize his cherished goal. Ironically, just three months later, the first East–West heads of government meeting since Potsdam took place in Geneva. Although he was not present, Churchill, the so-called original Cold Warrior, not only did much to make the summit happen but deserves to be acknowledged as the forefather of European détente.
The Churchill Archive is more than an archive devoted to Churchill. To study Churchill’s life and career from 1940 to 1955 is to study the origins and early course of the Cold War, the onset of the nuclear arms race, and the first moves towards arms control and détente.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a suggestion for starting points, and should be used in conjunction with the search facilities that will enable you to search across files for people, places and topics relevant to your individual research interests.
CHAR 20 – This contains a mass of material relating to Churchill’s wartime premiership, 1940–45, and provides a great deal of documentation relating to the tensions in the wartime Big Three alliance of the USA, the UK and the USSR. Churchill’s personal telegrams and minutes are all here – many of them typed up on Churchill’s instructions towards the end of the war as he began thinking ahead to the writing of his war memoirs. However, while these month-by-month digests are very valuable, they give us only Churchill’s side of the story: for the replies to his minutes and cables, researchers must look elsewhere, notably the UK National Archives at Kew Gardens, London, or else published volumes such as the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence. Unless you have a specific topic you wish to search for using the digital archive, the CHAR 20 catalogue hosted by the Churchill Archive Centre is a helpful aid to traversing this large collection. Some general and some specific highlights of CHAR 20 include:
Because of the ultra-secrecy surrounding the wartime development of an atomic bomb, most of Churchill’s TUBE ALLOYS input is to be found not in the Churchill Archive but in the PREM files at the UK National Archives in London, notably in the PREM 3/139 class. But the Churchill Archive includes some fascinating contextual material.
CHAR 8 – This class contains a mass of material relating to Churchill's literary pursuits – his books, articles and journalism. Nestling in this large collection is plenty of evidence of Churchill’s fascination with science and of his scientific imagination. Always on the lookout for ways in which science and technology could be put to the service of national defence and the armed forces, Churchill saw the atomic bomb as a model of the military appliance of science. Some highlights of CHAR 8 include:
CHAR 20 – This class contains a huge amount of material relating to Churchill’s wartime premiership, 1940–45, and although there is little directly connected with the atomic bomb, there is much on Churchill's attitude to so-called area or strategic bombing. He later acknowledged the linkage between the two issues when writing that the ‘hideous process of bombarding open cities from the air, once started by the Germans, was repaid twenty-fold by the ever-mounting power of the Allies, and found its culmination in the use of the atomic bombs which obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki[1]. Some highlights of CHAR 20 include:
Churchill–Attlee correspondence on the atomic bomb, autumn 1945
On 5 March 1946, Churchill, now leader of the Conservative Party in opposition in Britain, delivered his most famous post-war speech at Fulton, Missouri. Formally entitled ‘The Sinews of Peace’, the speech is much better known as the ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. In drawing attention to the threat to peace from the USSR and to the way in which the Soviet Union was dominating – and denying basic freedoms to – half of Europe, Churchill urged the USA to take the lead in resisting Moscow's expansion. Although not the ‘declaration’ of the Cold War that it is often supposed, the speech certainly predicted what might – and did – come to pass. The Churchill Archive contains much material relating to the speech in a number of different record classes. The following are some of the highlights.
In the late 1940s the Cold War really began to bite. In 1947, the United States began – as Churchill had hoped at the time of his Fulton speech – to assume the leadership of the ‘free world’ in its response to Soviet expansionism. First, in March 1947, the Truman Doctrine was promulgated; then in June 1947 the Marshall Plan for the economic revival of Europe was announced. In 1948, when Britain, the USA and France decided to create a separate West German state, the USSR responded with the Berlin blockade and, for almost a year, war in Europe seemed only a miscalculation away. Eventually, in May 1949, Stalin lifted the blockade. Meanwhile, the previous month, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed, and within a year this US-led grouping evolved into NATO, the shield of the West. Although in opposition, Churchill kept a close eye on the developing international situation and his reactions to events are dotted about the Churchill Archive.
Highlights from this period include:
CHUR 2/28 – This class contains a wealth of material relating to international affairs and, more particularly, atomic energy and nuclear weapons issues in the 1945–54 period. Of particular interest is the role of the atomic bomb in the Korean War context. At the end of November 1950, President Truman revealed that the use of the A-bomb in Korea or against Communist China was under active consideration. In Britain and elsewhere this caused a good deal of panic, especially since the USSR was popularly perceived to be a viable atomic power following its first A-bomb test in August 1949. Churchill, still in opposition, took solace in his wartime agreements with President Roosevelt, including an undertaking by both the UK and USA never to use weapons of mass destruction without each other’s consent. To Churchill’s mortification, in December 1950 Attlee told him that these agreements had been abandoned two years earlier, and that Britain no longer had any real influence over US nuclear policy or targeting. The highlights of this class as they touch on Korea include:
During the October 1951 General Election campaign, Labour sought to depict Churchill as a warmonger who, if elected, was liable to press the Americans to take advantage of their nuclear superiority to launch a so-called ‘preventive’ war against the Soviet Union. The consequences for Britain, which would be in the bull’s-eye of any Soviet nuclear retaliation, were potentially appalling. In the end, Churchill and the Conservatives won the election, but with a majority of less than twenty in Parliament.
Some highlights from the Archive from the early 1950s include:
CHUR 6/3A-C – This class contains a good deal of Churchill’s correspondence with President Dwight D. Eisenhower from January 1953, when Eisenhower was inaugurated, to April 1955, when Churchill stepped down as Prime Minister. The collection also includes a number of Eisenhower’s letters, making it possible for readers to experience the two-way correspondence. While the class does not include all their letters and cables, the gaps in the record can be mostly made good by consulting Peter G. Boyle (ed.), The Churchill–Eisenhower Correspondence 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). These two years were tumultuous ones in the Cold War and are marked by, amongst other things, the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and Churchill’s renewed quest thereafter to convene a summit of the top powers on the Potsdam or Yalta model from the Second World War; Eisenhower’s scepticism that the change of leadership in the Kremlin occasioned a change in basic Soviet foreign policy, hence his reluctance to contemplate a summit; and Churchill’s mounting horror of the H-bomb, the destructiveness of which could wipe out Britain and much of the world, he feared, if Cold War ever gave way to Hot War. Needless to say, his worries about thermonuclear destruction fed and sustained his quest – ultimately a failed one – to arrange a summit. Some highlights from this class include:
[1] Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), p.12.
