Winston Churchill – The Milli Chronicle

Banksy Unveils New London Sculpture of Flag-Bearing Figure in Westminster

NewsDesk MC — Fri, 01 May 2026 04:21:47 +0000

“The sculpture depicts a man marching forward while carrying a large flag that completely obscures his face, turning anonymity itself into the central image of the work.”

London — Street artist Banksy has confirmed that a newly installed sculpture in central London, depicting a man marching forward with his face entirely covered by a large flag, is his latest work, marking another rare public intervention by the elusive artist in the British capital.

The statue appeared overnight in Waterloo Place, Westminster, an area lined with official monuments and historic memorials near St James’s and close to government buildings and ceremonial landmarks. The work was first noticed on Wednesday, with Banksy’s signature scrawled at the base of the plinth, prompting immediate speculation over its authenticity.

Banksy confirmed authorship on Thursday through a post on Instagram, where he shared a video showing the sculpture being transported through London late at night before being installed at the site. The footage included images of nearby national symbols and landmarks, including the statue of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, British flags, a Beefeater guard and a traditional black cab, suggesting a deliberate visual dialogue between the new work and established representations of British identity and state symbolism.

The sculpture itself shows a male figure stepping forward from a plinth while holding a large billowing flag that covers his entire face. The concealment of the subject’s identity appears central to the composition, contrasting with the traditional commemorative statues surrounding it, many of which celebrate named military, royal and political figures.In the video posted by Banksy, a passerby is asked for his opinion of the statue and replies, “No, I don’t like it,” a brief exchange that adds to the artist’s longstanding use of public reaction as part of the presentation of his work.

The statue has been placed in Waterloo Place, near monuments to Edward VII, Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War Memorial, an area known for its formal statuary and ceremonial significance. Its location places it within one of London’s most symbolically charged public spaces, where imperial memory and national commemoration dominate the landscape.

Banksy, whose identity remains officially unconfirmed, is best known internationally for politically charged graffiti works that appear without warning in public spaces and often address war, migration, inequality, surveillance and state power. While murals and stencil works remain his most recognisable form, he has previously installed sculptural works in London.One of his best-known earlier sculptures, “The Drinker,” was installed on Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s West End in 2004.

The work was a satirical reinterpretation of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker,” showing the figure slumped with a traffic cone placed on its head. It was removed shortly after installation. In 2019, Sotheby’s withdrew the sculpture from auction following concerns over its ownership and removal history.Banksy’s most recent confirmed London work before the Waterloo Place statue was a mural unveiled in December showing two children lying on their backs and looking upward.

The mural appeared near Centre Point Tower and was widely interpreted as referencing homelessness, with the tower long associated with Britain’s housing inequality and homelessness debates. The children in the mural appeared to be pointing toward the building, linking the artwork to wider concerns over urban displacement and housing insecurity.

Another work appeared in September outside the Royal Courts of Justice, where Banksy created a mural showing a judge using a gavel to strike a protester lying defenseless on the ground. The image emerged during a period of heightened arrests linked to demonstrations involving signs associated with the proscribed activist group Palestine Action. The mural was later removed.

Court authorities said they were legally required to preserve the listed character of the building and could not retain the artwork permanently.The new Westminster sculpture arrives as public interest in Banksy’s identity has again intensified following a recent Reuters investigation that reported the artist was likely Robin Gunningham, a Bristol-born figure who has long been suspected of being Banksy.

Reuters said its findings aligned with a similar investigation first published by the Mail on Sunday in 2008.Gunningham has denied being Banksy. According to Reuters, Banksy’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, said the artist “does not accept that many of the details contained within your inquiry are correct” and stressed that anonymity remained essential because Banksy had been “subjected to fixated, threatening and inappropriate behaviour.”The preservation of anonymity has long been central to both the artist’s legal protection and public mythology.

Banksy’s work frequently appears without official permission and often challenges institutions of power, making anonymity both a practical necessity and a core part of the artistic identity itself.The new sculpture’s use of a face hidden behind a national flag may also reinforce that theme, placing concealment, identity and public symbolism at the centre of the work.

Unlike conventional monuments that celebrate recognisable individuals, the Waterloo Place installation removes personal identity altogether, replacing portraiture with obscurity.Its proximity to Churchill’s statue is particularly notable. Churchill remains one of Britain’s most politically contested historical figures, and monuments associated with imperial history and nationalism have been the subject of repeated public debate in recent years.

By placing a faceless flag-bearer within this landscape, the work appears to invite reflection on patriotism, public memory and the politics of visibility.No official statement has been issued by Westminster authorities regarding the installation or whether it will remain permanently in place. As with many Banksy works, questions over ownership, preservation and removal are likely to follow.

Public artworks by Banksy often trigger disputes between local councils, private property owners and cultural institutions over conservation and commercial value. Several murals have been removed for protection or sale, while others have been destroyed or painted over.

For now, the Waterloo Place statue remains in place, attracting visitors and photographers in one of London’s busiest ceremonial districts. Its sudden appearance, followed by Banksy’s confirmation, has once again turned a section of the capital into an open-air site of interpretation, where the meaning of the work is shaped as much by public debate as by the sculpture itself.

Allies’ successful first invasion but a ‘botched’ job: Operation Torch, 80 years on

Millichronicle — Tue, 08 Nov 2022 15:35:54 +0000

France24

Five days after Montgomery’s forces clinched their victory over Rommel over in Egypt, the Allies defeated their opponents in Morocco and Algeria on November 16.

On November 8,1942, the Western Allies launched Operation Torch, landing in Vichy-controlled Morocco and Algeria to open up a second front in World War II. Torch was a paradoxical operation: The Allies won in just over a week, but losses were relatively high as the operation provided harsh lessons to be learned ahead of the D-Day landings 18 months later.

French soldier Louis Laplace described the shock for the Vichy forces as the Allies landed. “All of a sudden the sirens were going off; it was the first time I heard them in North Africa,” recounted the soldier in Vichy forces’ anti-aircraft division. “A few minutes later, we saw a plane flying low over the water, releasing a curtain of smoke. And then I realised that he was American.”

The British and Americans had decided on the operation a few months before. Winston Churchill’s advocacy of landings in North Africa triumphed over widespread scepticism in Washington. Franklin D. Roosevelt was receptive to Churchill’s strategic vision, overriding his military staff.

Roosevelt wanted US troops involved in a big operation in the fight against Nazi Germany “to stifle popular clamour at home for action”, noted Richard Overy, a professor of history at Exeter University and the author of several books on the Second World War including ‘Why the Allies Won‘. The US president was “also aware of America’s growing dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and Torch would be a way of getting a foothold on an area close to the oil”, Overy continued.

Torch was part of the climax of the long-running North Africa campaign – the predominant theatre for the Western Allies at this point in the war. Britain won a series of resounding victories over fascist Italy in the desert, but were forced onto the back foot when Adolf Hitler deployed German troops under General Erwin Rommel to rescue the Italians.

Then Torch was executed just before the British completed their remarkable victory in the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 11, when Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s forces defeated Rommel’s Afrika Corps – the turning point for the Western Allies against Nazi Germany.

The Allies relied on local resistance to carry out the landings, however small it was. In Algeria, they were able to rely on a group of around 400 Résistants which had formed upon the Fall of France in May 1940; French pied noirs in Algeria mainly backed Vichy at the time. The vast majority of the Resistance band were young Jews appalled at the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic measures. Medical student José Aboulker, who became the leader of the network in Algiers, was among them.

‘Very tough fighting’

With strong contributions from monarchist Resistance fighter Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, they gave “tactical information to make the Anglo-American landings easier”, said French historian Tramor Quemeneur, author of the book 8 novembre 1942, Résistance et débarquement allié en Afrique du Nord (“November 8, 1942: the Resistance and the Allied Landings in North Africa”).

Torch was a colossal logical undertaking, with some 107,000 Allied troops deployed (84,000 American and 23,000 British) as well as 110 transport ships. The high command selected nine landing sites on the North African coast; six in Morocco and three in Algeria.

In Algiers, that Resistance of some 400 people made it easy to put the Vichy forces out of action. They seized the strategic administrative and military centres in the Algerian city and arrested the main military leaders, including Admiral François Darlan – a hugely important figure, formerly the number two to Vichy’s leader Marshall Philippe Pétain, and at that point the commander-in-chief of the Vichy French army – and General Alphonse Juin, commander-in-chief of Vichy forces in North Africa.

But elsewhere things were much more difficult for the Allies. Despite the Resistance taking out the Vichy high command, nearly 500 American and British troops were killed.

“The fighting was very tough,” Quemeneur observed. Vichy officers benefitted from some intelligence regarding the landing plan in Oran. In Morocco and the city of Oran on the Algerian coast, Vichy forces were “ordered to fight – and they did”, the French historian put it. By fighting the Allies directly, Vichy removed any hint of ambiguity about its pro-Nazi position.

“Torch was a pretty botched operation, prepared in haste with [inexperienced] US troops and too little equipment,” Overy said. “Success depended on Montgomery’s progress in the […] desert, and assistance from British air force commanders in getting combined and effective use of air power. In the end, German and Italian forces were bled white by British naval and air power in the Mediterranean, which blockaded the Axis forces in Tunsia. Nevertheless, for the Americans it was a long learning curve, with no real experience to go on.”

Five days after Montgomery’s forces clinched their victory over Rommel over in Egypt, the Allies defeated their opponents in Morocco and Algeria on November 16.

The Germans responded to the landings by occupying the whole of France on November 11, not just the north and Atlantic coastline. The so-called Free Zone in the south, administered by Vichy, no longer existed. Then on November 22, the Allies cemented their success in Operation Torch by signing a political and military co-operation agreement with Darlan as he switched sides.

As well as humiliating Vichy, Operation Torch led to the Western Allies’ successful Italian campaign, starting with the landings on Sicily in 1943. “Torch paved the way for the defeat of Benito Mussolini’s regime as well as the withering of Axis strength in the Mediterranean,” Quemeneur observed.

But unlike the Soviet victory at Stalingrad and the British victory at El Alamein, Torch was not significant enough to be a “pivotal moment” in the fight against Nazi Germany, said French historian Jean-Marie Guillon.

Eventually, the Western Allies’ decisive blow to Nazi Germany came from the D-Day landings in 1944. “The only way victory could be achieved in the West was invasion from Britain and victory in the Battle of the Atlantic,” Overy put it. “Torch contributed very little to this except to show how deficient amphibious warfare doctrine was, and the need to introduce very great improvements.”