Winston Churchill He must have died many times. Stabbed, drowned, in an aviation accident, pneumonia, run over, on the battlefield, of a serious totally avoidable fall. His life was a Succession of encounters with deathalways raffled by centimeters, seconds or simple blows of luck.
Death lurked him again and again, but always failed. His scythe, worn out by waiting, was left without a edge before he could reach it. If the grim 20th century history would have been completely different. Without Churchill in 1940, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis They would have found little or no resistance to dominate Europe.
The man that death could not catch
With just ten years, a knife opened his belly In a Hove internship. A year later, his fragile health took him to bed with a severe pneumonia. But these children’s incidents were nothing compared to what would come.
At 18, in a reckless attempt to impress his brother and his cousin, jumped from a bridge With the idea of landing in a tree and descending sliding down the branches. Failed. He fell head, entered a coma and took months to recover. It was only the first of many times that his body demonstrated an almost absurd resistance.
Already as a young British army officer, the danger became a routine. In Sudanin 1898, he participated in a cavalry load in which dozens of their companions died. Shortly after, in the Bóeres Warhe was captured, but managed to escape in one of those exploits that only seem credible when they bear his name.
In the World War Ialready with a rising political career, he decided that he could not stay out and launched himself in front with him 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He crossed the land of anyone more than thirty times, exposing himself to the enemy fire without apparent reason more than his own recklessness.
But not only the battlefield tried to take it. In 1893, a storm He turned his boat on Lake Leman and almost drown. Throughout his life, he starred three car accidentsone of them a frontal clash. In New York, in 1931, a Bus ran over him. He got up with a dislocated shoulder and a cut on his face. He also survived fire from your home, to Two air accidents Already four episodes of pneumonia. “We will never give up,” he would say later in one of his most famous speeches, although he could also have talked about himself.
Despite his life full of dangers, his habits did not help. Churchill He worked endless days up to 120 hours per week. He traveled thousands of kilometers in reference and ice creams during the war, smoked more than 300,000 cigars and drank whiskey even at breakfast. Your personal secretary, Elizabeth Shakespearrecognized years later how exhausting was to keep up.
What would have happened in Europe if Churchill had died instead of surviving?
On May 10, 1940, when he assumed the position of United Kingdom Prime Ministerhe had already survived more than a dozen situations that could have ended his life.
If in any of them the outcome would have been another, the story would have changed dramatically. Without him, the British government could have opted for negotiate peace with Hitler After Dunkerque, as a part of his cabinet wanted. Without his insistence on resisting, without his absolute refusal to agree with the Nazis, the fate of Europe would have been another.
In an alternative reality without Churchill, as theorizes the magazine Very interestingGreat Britain could have accepted in 1940 the mediation of Benedict Mussolini To negotiate with Germany. With the United Kingdom out of combat, Hitler would have concentrated all his warlike machinery against the Soviet Union, conquering Moscow in July 1941.
USAisolated in his Pacific War after the attack on Pearl Harbor, would not have intervened in Europe. Without Churchill or Franklin D. Rooseveltthe Nazi Germany would have consolidated its absolute domain on the continent.
But Churchill survived. In 1942, he visited the front in Africa. In 1944, it toured Italy. In 1945, he crossed the Rin with allied troops. He wanted to disembark in Normandy Day dbut the King Jorge VI He forbade it. It didn’t matter: his personal resistance had already inclined the balance of history. Churchill died In 1965, to 90 years. By then, he had dodged death so many times that it seemed immortal.
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