Exactly the same for me, no one told me shit about this, I also found out in my 50s. What a whitewash!

Churchill is a particularly difficult historical figure, because on one hand, probably no other person in Britain could have successfully resisted the Nazis, and if England had fallen then the Nazis would have won right then, though it took the Red Army to actually defeat them in the end.

But on the other hand, Churchill was a drunken genocidal right-wing racist who as a cavalry officer had already individually killed many people simply defending their homes, nearly all dark-skinned, before graduating to the exalted level where he could get other people to commit his murders for him in industrial quantity.

Living in Amsterdam as I do now, and having a grandfather who spent years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, also complicates my emotions.

During the Blitz, Churchill would order his chauffeur to drive him to where the bombs were falling and then he'd run out of the car and shake his fist at the sky and scream obscenities at the German planes. (IIRC, Parliament eventually had to step in to stop it.)

Perhaps that sums him up as well as anything for both good and bad. I would wish for a world without either Hitlers or Churchills or Stalins but this won't be until after the Collapse, may it be as soon and mild as possible.