For some of the younger crowd let me give some context to this.
There was no single person more instrumental to the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis then Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The Second World War started in September 1939;
Churchill was elected Prime Minister in 1940 and held office until 1945 (later re-elected in the 50โs).
For several years, England and the Commonwealth were on their own fighting the Nazis since the United States did not enter the war until 1941.
Churchillโs powers of oratory were unparalleled and he was an intellectual giant (he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953). I am hard-pressed to think of a politician in the last 30 years that could remotely come close to him as a genuine leader.
A great part of what he did in the early years of the war was to maintain the moral of the British populace that was being subjected to direct attack from the German forces by aircraft bombings and rocket attacks.
One of the ways that he did this was through his speeches and the image that he conveyed. An excerpt from a famous speech in parliament in June 1940
โโฆEven 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, โฆโ
His image giving a โVโ for victory salute and puffing on a cigar was iconic and instrumental in changing the world. To deny any truth of that time is a disservice to the generations that follow.