Winston Churchill
"Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender."
Winston Churchill - known to the Russians as "The British Bulldog" for his unyielding tenaciousness and his awesome ability to train killer attack hounds to run up and bite Fascists in the jugular when they weren't looking - was one of the most badass world leaders of the modern era. This dude was a totally righteous asskicker who enjoyed puffing on Cuban cigars, shooting guns, drinking copious amounts of booze, and kicking Nazis in the fucking balls with a Size 10 steel-toed boot, and he didn't give a crap about anything that didn't further his goal of accomplishing one of those four tasks. He fought hard, partied hard, wore a lot of totally awesome suits, and pretty much always looked like he'd just stepped out of a badass 1930s pulp fiction detective story.
Winston was directly descended from an epic 17th century face-wrecker named John Churchill. John will eventually have a page on this site as well, but since I haven't gotten around to writing it yet here's a brief rundown of that dude's life: He was born into extreme poverty, joined the army as a lowly page, worked his way up through the ranks to command the entire British military, was knighted, became a Duke, served under five different Kings, beat the snot out of Louis XIV's allegedly-invincible army, and is now remembered (along with Wellington) as Britain's greatest and most brilliant military commander. So that guy was a tough act to follow. Winston didn't disappoint.
Winston Churchill graduated from the Royal Military Academy in 1894, and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars cavalry regiment. He was his school's fencing champion (no small feat considering that every man there was actively training in the arts of war) and the best polo player in the entire regiment (almost equally as impressive seeing as how you'd think professional cavalrymen would be pretty fucking good at polo). As part of the 4th Hussars, Churchill saw action on battlefields in Cuba, India, and Afghanistan. When he wasn't stabbing motherfuckers in the neck with a saber or trampling them beneath the hooves of his Epic Mount, he worked as a war correspondent for a newspaper back in England. This, of course, was back in the days when war reporters weren't interested in stupid shit like impartiality, staying out of the crossfire, and not shooting peoples' faces off with a rifle. Churchill out go out, fight the battle, kill a bunch of people, and then go back to base to write an article about how awesome it was. He'd then send his story out, the British papers would print it, and everybody would think that he was the fucking balls.
Well one day a dude claiming to be the Mahdi (the Shi'a Islamic messiah) incited a massive rebellion in the Sudan and started having British governors beaten down like garter snakes during Whacking Day, so Winston Effing Churchill was transfered to the 21st Lancers and shipped out to Africa to dish out some vigorous assbeatings. "The British Bustnuts" was on the field during the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, and holds the distinct honor of participating in the last great cavalry charge of the British Empire. 400 of Churchill's Lancers were chasing down a small group of fleeing Mahdists, when all of a sudden a giant group of about 2,500 dervishes came out of nowhere ambushed them. The Lancers didn't even break stride – they fucking plowed into the enemy line, despite being outnumbered six-to-one, and somehow actually managed to drive the defenders from the field. According to legend, Churchill turned the tide of the fight when he activated his special attack and skewered ten Mahdists with his magical Lightning Spear of Dervish-Slaying +2.
A couple years later, Winston was unleashed upon South Africa to fight in the Boer Wars. Things were going pretty well for a while, until one day Churchill decided to be completely awesome and start riding around in an armor-plated Death Train. The Boers ambushed the train, and Churchill fought them off for a while, but he was eventually overpowered, captured, and sent to a prison camp in Pretoria. Well fuck that shit. Churchill busted out of there pretty much immediately, probably by smashing through a ten-foot high brick wall with his forehead, and made his way 300 miles through uncharted enemy territory until he made it back to English lines. He rejoined the army, fought in the Siege of Ladysmith, and returned to Pretoria as an officer in a British cavalry regiment. He raced ahead of the main body of the army and personally accepted the surrender of 52 camp guards from the prison in which he had been incarcerated.
"A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him."
After a brief stint fighting on the front lines as a battalion commander in the Grenadier Guards – one of the most prestigious and elite military units in the British Army – for the entirety of World War I (no big deal, right?), Churchill was elected to the British Parliament. Thanks for his oratory skill and his generally-unassailable badassery, Churchill worked his way up through the ranks, constantly pushing for the construction of tanks, aircraft, and warships (Spoiler Alert: This foresight would actually work out pretty well for Winston down the line). He also took every possible opportunity to tell Communism and Nazism to "suck it" because Churchill fucking loved Democracy and Capitalism and that's just how he rolled.
Well between World War I and World War II, the Prime Minister of England was a dude named Neville Chamberlain, who is now pretty much universally-recognized as the neutral-aligned dipshit who stood idly by and let Hitler have his way with Europe. Chamberlain was all about appeasing the Nazis, and as a result the Third Reich conquered half of the continent in about twelve hours, and Hitler started talking all kinds of shit about how awesome he was. Fuck that. Winston Churchill wasn't interested in appeasement, neutrality, or diplomacy – he was only interested in kicking Hitler in the fucking balls until he passed out from the pain and then ruthlessly smashing his unconscious body repeatedly in the face with a tire iron. Chamberlain was fired for incompetence, Churchill was elected PM, and the new leader of England immediately started giving a bunch of awesome pump-up speeches that got everybody in the British Isles totally stoked about face-punching Nazi bitches.
Now the situation in England was pretty shitty when Churchill took over. France had capitulated, Poland and Czechoslovakia were in German hands, and Hitler hadn't invaded Russia yet, so the full might of the Nazi war machine was bearing down exclusively on the British Isles. Planes and rockets were buzzing over London day and night, a small force of British pilots were doing their best to fight off the near-constant aerial bombardments, and air raid sirens were the soundtrack to most peoples' daily lives. It was obvious that Hitler was just softening up the island for an invasion. Despite the bleak forecast, and with little or no help from the United States in sight, Churchill still refused to surrender of back down. When he wasn't vowing to resist Nazi aggression with every resource available or inspiring the citizens of England to fight to the death against any possible invasion, he was out there photocopying his bare ass and faxing copies of it to the fucking Reichstag's main office number. He inspired his people to resist, and thanks to the determination of the British people, Hitler never managed to gain a foothold on the island. The Battle of Britain was a decisive victory for the pilots and the citizens of England, and any hope the Fuhrer had of fucking with Britain was effectively crotchstomped. Frustrated by his defeat, Hitler invaded Russia, and we all know how that worked out for him.
During the war, Churchill worked hard to secure supplies and aid from the US, built up relations with the Allied nations, and encouraged the creation of units like the Special Operations Executive and the Commandos. Shit, he even negotiated an alliance with Stalin, because, as Churchill put it, "If Hitler were to invade Hell, I should find occasion to make a favorable reference to the Devil." He went to conferences across the globe, directed the war effort, and decided the future of the world in the post-war era. Thanks in no small part to his efforts, the Allies emerged victorious.
After the war, Churchill continued his political career, wrote a bunch of history books, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and basically kept doing a bunch of awesome shit. He died in 1965 at the age of 90, and is now remembered as one of the greatest leaders in the long and illustrious history of the British Commonwealth.
"What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"