The Fighting Sons and Daughters – Part II

The serving children of leaders

Three Allied leaders whose children contributed to the war effort. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference. Churchill’s daughter is standing in the second row. (Photo: Imperial War Museums)

The children of wartime national leaders are always under the microscope of public attention. Are they doing their part for the country? Are they kept safe or are they receiving special treatment at a time when so many others fight and die? The first part of our article (The Fighting Sons and Daughters – Part I), published earlier this year, briefly described the wartime service of the children of President Roosevelt and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This time, we look at the children of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

The Churchill family
Britain was pressed hard in World War II, facing the Axis onslaught alone between the fall of France and the American entry into the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill himself had a past of military service; it is no surprise that his children joined the war effort.

The Churchill daughters
Four out of Churchill’s five children reached adulthood; the eldest and least famous among them was Diana Spencer Churchill. Fascinated by politics at an early age, she often accompanied his father to meetings and later even made speeches at events. She was one of the first women to volunteer for service once the war broke out, and served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, popularly known as Wrens). The women’s branch of the Royal Navy was originally formed during World War I, disbanded at the end of the war, and reformed in 1939, and provided roles such as cooks, clerks, telegraphists, radar plotters, weapons analysts, range assessors, and electricians and mechanics.

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Diana Churchill with her father in 1928
(Photo: Country Life magazine)

Sarah Spencer-Churchill joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she worked in photo reconnaissance. She contributed to the analysis of recon photos in preparation of Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. She was also known as a quick and versatile interpreter. She accompanied her father to the Yalta Conference (Planning World War II – Part I) (Part II), where she met President Roosevelt’s daughter Anna - both of them had the same job: managing their temperamental fathers.

Sarah Spencer-Churchill studying aerial photographs
(Photo: Churchill Archives Centre)

Mary Spencer Churchill worked for the Red Cross and the Women’s Voluntary Service between 1939 and 1941. The latter was a wartime organization which had no ranks and had women of vastly different social classes work side by side. Its wartime activities included evacuating civilians from urban areas, collecting clothes for the needy, and setting up mobile canteens for air raid wardens and firemen during the Blitz.

Mary Churcill with her father at the Potsdam Conference
(Photo: National Archives)

Mary Churchill joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army, in 1941. She served in anti-aircraft batteries in London, Belgium and Germany, and rose to the rank of Junior Commander (the equivalent of Captain). She also accompanied her father on several trips as aide-de-camp.

Randolph Churchill
Randolph Frederick Edward Spencer Churchill, Winston Churchill’s only son, was the black sheep of the family. His father, who was neglected by his parents as a child, lavished him with attention, care and adoration, which probably contributed to Randolph becoming a spoiled brat, an attitude that stayed with him for life. As a student, he struggled academically, had regular discipline problems and eventually dropped out of Oxford. He regularly accrued great depths, in no small part due to heavy drinking, excessive gambling and an extravagant lifestyle. He was foul-tempered and unpopular with his peers, pursued a political career for a while, and eventually settled down after the war as a successful gossip columnist.

Randolph Churchill in 1935
(Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London)

Randolph joined his father’s old regiment, the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars, as a second lieutenant in August 1938 a reservist officer, and was called up a year later. He was one of the oldest junior officers in the outfit and was not liked by his men. On one occasion, he walked a 106-mile (170 km) round trip within 24 hours (with 20 minutes to spare) on a bet (the losers did not pay up).

When the war started, he traveled with Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten (Lord Mountbatten) to Cherbourg (The Liberation of Cherbourg) in Normandy to return the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to Britain from their exile. Randolph appeared on deck in untidy uniform, with his spurs attached upside down – the Duke, shocked, bent down to fit his spurs properly.

Breakfast during Churchill’s visit to Tripoli in 1943. Left to right: General Sir Alan Brooke, Major Randolph Churchill, Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, Winston Churchill, General Sir Bernard Montgomery
(Photo: Imperial War Museum)

Randolph transferred to No. 8 (Guards) Commando in early 1941 and shipped out to Egypt. He got into such a deep gambling debt on the way that his wife had to sell the wedding presents and jewelry, sublet her home and move to a cheap room on the top floor of a hotel, a dangerous place during the Blitz, just to help him pay his debt. (The marriage did not survive the strain, and she began an affair with her future husband, Averell Harriman, President Roosevelt’s special envoy to Europe.)

Randolph served as an intelligence officer in Egypt. Still unpopular, he once broke down in tears after being told just how much his fellow officers disliked him. He joined the newly formed Special Air Service (SAS) in 1942 and went on an eight-man raid against Benghazi in Libya behind enemy lines. The raid did not accomplish its goal, and Randolph seriously dislocated his back in a road accident on the way home. He witnessed the American landings in Morocco during Operation Torch, and accompanied his father (and sister Sarah) to the Tehran Conference in November 1943. A bad quarrel between father and son over Randolph’s failed marriage might have contributed to Winston Churchill’s serious heart attack shortly afterward.

Randolph in Cairo
(Photo: Cecil Beaton)

Randolph was invited to join an intelligence and diplomatic mission to Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the Yugoslavian partisans. Churchill gave permission with the warning that Randolph was not to be captured by the Gestapo, as he (Winston Churchill) did not want to receive his son’s fingers one by one. Randolph parachuted into Yugoslavia in late January 1944. In July, he was among the ten survivors of a Dakota (The C-47) crash that left him with spinal and knee injuries. He took charge of the military mission to Croatia after recovery, and was back to Yugoslavia by September. He remained a drunkard and a bully (though he could be excellent company on his good days), and was demobilized in 1946. He retired from the army at the honorary rank of major in 1961.

Stalin’s family
Stalin had two sons and a daughter; he also adopted the orphaned son of an old friend who had died in an accident involving an experimental, propeller-driven railcar. All three sons saw military service.

Yakov Iosifovich Dzugashvili
Stalin’s eldest son Yakov was born in 1907 in the Caucasus region of Georgia to Stalin’s first wife. (“Dzugashvili” was Stalin’s original family name.) This was one of the happier periods of Stalin’s life: he was a young revolutionary, recently married and with a penchant for violence, soon to start planning a daring bank stagecoach robbery to fund Bolshevik activities. Unfortunately for Stalin, the happiness was cut short when his wife died nine months after the birth of their son. Stalin immediately left, abandoning the boy to be raised by his mother’s family.

Yakov Dzugashvili
(Photo: unknown photographer)

Yakov next saw his father at the age of 14, when Stalin, a leading figure in the Bolshevik movement by then, had him brought to Moscow. Yakov was shy and unhappy, attempting suicide several times. On one occasion, after a row with Stalin over Yakov’s plan to marry, he shot himself in the chest, barely missing the heart; Stalin only responded with "He can't even shoot straight." He could not understand Russian, he lived in the Kremlin but had to sleep in the dining room, and Stalin was unreasonably hostile to him, possibly because he reminded him of his happier past. He was not allowed to adopt “Stalin” as his own family name. He entered the Artillery Academy in 1937 after a two-year stint as a chimney-sweep engineer at a factory, and graduated in 1941.

The Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Stalin made sure that Yakov and Stalin’s adopted son Artyom Sergeyev, a fellow artillery officer, were sent to the front lines. Yakov was serving with a howitzer battery as a lieutenant, and was captured at Smolensk on July 16. The circumstances of his capture are uncertain. Some sources claim he declared “I am the son of Stalin and I do not permit the battery to retreat” and held his position until overrun. On the other hand, some Soviet prisoners of war stated they gave up Yakov willingly as they hated the Stalinist system.

Stalin was informed of his son’s captivity three days later and was outraged. He forbade soldiers to surrender, and having his own son do it felt like a disgrace – he though his Yakov should have killed himself to prevent capture.

Yakov shortly after his capture
(Photo: Wolfram von Richthofen)

Yakov removed his officer’s insignia to pass for an ordinary soldier, but was quickly recognized and sent to the Abwehr, the German military intelligence for interrogation. At the interrogation, he criticized his own and other Red Army units for being unprepared for war and having commanders who behaved poorly. He also praised Germany, claiming that the “whole of Europe would be nothing” without it; berated the United Kingdom as weak; and made an anti-Semitic tirade, even though his own wife was ethnically Jewish. (Not the one he tried to kill himself over; he ended up marrying someone else.)

The Germans used the high-profile prisoner for propaganda: photos of him smiling with his captors were dropped on Soviet troops along with rhetorical questions of why they’re still fighting to the death when the son of their leader has already surrendered. Meanwhile, Yakov became distressed by the stream of visitors at the prisoner-of-war camp who wanted to be photographed with him. He shunned others and got into altercations with British prisoners, and was eventually transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

After German Field Marsal Friedrich Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943, the Germans contacted Stalin and offered to return Yakov Dzugashvili in exchange for Paulus. Stalin outright refused, just as he refused the idea of exchanging his son for Hitler’s half-nephew, who was also in Soviet captivity.

Yakov died on April 14, 1943. The circumstances of his death are not entirely clear, but an NKVD investigation after the war settled on the following version. At 7 p.m., the SS guards of the camp ordered prisoners into their barracks, but Yakov refused to go and demanded to see the commandant. Once denied, he became agitated and ran into an electrified barb wire fence which killed him instantly. A guard believed he was trying to escape and shot him in the head, apparently after he had already died from electrocution.

Yakov Dzugashvili’s body still entangled in the barb wire
(Photo: rarehistoricalphotos.com)

Vasily Iosifovich Stalin Dzhugashvili
Stalin’s other biological son, Vasily, had a much easier life than his half-brother, though his didn’t have a very happy ending, either. Vasily’s mother committed suicide when he was eleven; Vasily and his sister were told she died to a complication in surgery, and they only learned the truth a decade later. Vasily took the loss poorly: he started drinking at the age of 13, turning violent when he was drunk. With Stalin being an absent father, Vasily grew close with a friendly NKVD officer, who in turn was executed in Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937.

Vasily with his sister Svetlana and father Stalin
(Photo: Getty Images)

Vasily struggled in school both academically and discipline-wise, and was eventually sent to a military aviation school at the age of 17. He remained a poor student and couldn’t handle unexpected problems in the air, but he did receive praise for his political acuity. Stalin instructed the school not to afford his son any special treatment, but it’s a safe assumption that being Stalin’s son still got Vasily a great deal of leniency. He finished the school in 1940 with “excellent” final marks and a commission as air force lieutenant.

Vasily was sent to the front with a fake surname during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He flew 29 missions and scored two kills. Most of his fellow officers hated him since they considered him his father’s informant. He was sent back to Moscow with the job of inspecting the air force in the spring of 1942. Bored in this position, he got demoted after some deadly shenanigans: he had explosives dropped into the Moskva River, injuring himself and getting a flight engineer killed.

Vasily as lieutenant-general in the cockpit of a plane
(Photo: unknown photographer)

The demotion was only a temporary setback, and Vasily continued to rise in the ranks, becoming the youngest major-general in the Red Army at the age of 24 and receiving several high decorations. He became Commander of the Air Forces of the Moscow Military District in 1948.

Vasily lived the high life for a short while: booze, parties, luxurious living, a private hunting society, and various sports teams to his name, all illegally paid for with state and military funds. The gravy train crashed in the spring of 1953 when Stalin died. Being the former dictator’s son suddenly stopped being a shield and an advantage, and became a massive liability as the country’s new leadership tried to distance itself from the old. He was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison for counter-revolutionary offenses and theft of state funds.

Vasily Stalin
(Photo: public domain)

Vasily was given a chance for clemency six and a half years into his sentence, but it fell through – possibly because he stubbornly demanded full amnesty and restoration to the rank of general. He was released on the original schedule. Considered a loose cannon, he was exiled to Northern Russia where he drank himself to death, dying two days before his 41st birthday.

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