Speeches on the Second World War and its aftermath, 1940–6
WINSTON CHURCHILL
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Born 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome (daughter of an American tycoon).
Educated at Harrow School and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He served as a soldier and war correspondent, seeing action at the Battle of Omdurman (1897) in the Sudan and against the Boers in South Africa, where he escaped from captivity. Elected to Parliament as a Conservative MP in 1900, he switched to the governing Liberal Party in 1904, rising to become home secretary (1910) and then First Lord of the Admiralty (1911). In 1915, he took responsibility for the failed Gallipoli (Dardanelles) campaign against the Turks and left politics for the Western Front, before returning as minister of munitions (1917). He was secretary for war and air (1919–21) and then, supporting the Conservatives, a relatively unsuccessful chancellor of the exchequer (1924–9). After nearly a decade of alienation from the Conservative Party leadership, he joined Chamberlain’s War Cabinet in September 1939 as First Lord of the Admiralty, before succeeding him as prime minister in May 1940, when he created a new coalition government. A notably hands-on and energetic wartime leader, he established a mood of defiance through his speeches and worked hard for a transatlantic alliance: he and President Roosevelt elaborated their war aims in the 1941 Atlantic Charter. When peace returned, he became Leader of the Opposition after the Labour Party won the 1945 election; he spoke widely in support of the United Nations and warned about the Cold War and nuclear threats. He was returned to the premiership in 1951, knighted in 1953, and he retired in 1955. The ‘greatest living Englishman’, as he became known, enjoyed bricklaying, landscape painting, historical writing, and copious amounts of champagne and cigars.
Died 24 January 1965 in London; he received a state funeral.
Of all british political figures of the 20th-century, one stands out as the pre-eminent speechmaker: Winston Churchill. To an extent, the continuing resonance of his Second World War speeches is a reflection of the turbulent times in which they were made. But beyond that, history has accorded them a central role in maintaining Britain’s war effort, especially in 1940–1 when a relatively vulnerable country stood alone against the might of the German war machine. Churchill took the events of the war, often dispiriting in themselves, and interpreted them in a way that turned potential doom and despondency into self-belief, defiance and purposefulness. By stressing – even exaggerating – what was at stake, he cast his beloved British Empire in a global drama about saving civilization. There was a Messianic element, and it flattered and empowered his listeners, making them believe that war against Nazi Germany was a battle worth fighting and one which they could win.
Early on in his career, Churchill felt intellectually inferior to many of his peers because he had not pursued a university education. He regretted the lack of practice in public speaking that he would have gained in university debates. He also suffered from a slight lisp and a stammer, so from the beginning he set about drafting his speeches so as to avoid patterns of everyday speech that he found difficult. He visited speech therapists and practised words and gestures in front of a mirror. He sometimes spent weeks constructing speeches, refining and improving them, and he came up with a style that was unique. His vocabulary was extremely large, filled with inventive word play, alliteration, vivid imagery and metaphor.
His style did not always suit the mood of the times. His big set-piece speeches in the House of Commons, to which he was first elected in 1900, were often criticized as being out of touch. During his ‘wilderness years’ of the 1930s, as a backbench MP, he delivered apocalyptic messages so often that politicians and the public alike were tempted to ignore them. But his conviction about Nazi Germany – that it was insatiably expansionist – turned out to be well founded. As Britain declared war in September 1939, Churchill was recalled to the Cabinet. By 10 May 1940, with German forces invading the Low Countries, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s credibility was shattered and Churchill’s moment had come. Chamberlain recommended to King George VI that Churchill take up the premiership. It was perhaps his best decision, and for Churchill it felt as though ‘all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour’. On 13 May, he explained to the House of Commons what he had to offer the country.
ON FRIDAY EVENING LAST I RECEIVED FROM HIS MAJESTY the mission to form a new administration. It was the evident will of Parliament and the nation that this should be conceived on the broadest possible basis and that it should include all parties. I have already completed the most important part of this task.
. . . I now invite the House by a resolution to record its approval of the steps taken and declare its confidence in the new government. The resolution is: ‘That this House welcomes the formation of a government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion.’
To form an administration of this scale and complexity is a serious undertaking in itself. But we are in the preliminary phase of one of the greatest battles in history. We are in action at many other points – in Norway and in Holland – and we have to be prepared in the Mediterranean. The air battle is continuing, and many preparations have to be made here at home.
In this crisis I think I may be pardoned if I do not address the House at any length today, and I hope that any of my friends and colleagues or former colleagues who are affected by the political reconstruction will make all allowances for any lack of ceremony with which it has been necessary to act.
I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs – victory in spite of all terrors – victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Let that be realized. No survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall move forward towards his goal.
I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, ‘Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.’
Within two weeks of taking office, Churchill faced disaster. Belgium’s King Leopold surrendered, opening his country to the German forces, and the Netherlands had been knocked out of the war. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and a large body of French troops were caught in a German pincer movement and cut off. France was losing battles and the will to fight, and without the troops of the BEF it was unlikely that Britain would be able to resist a German invasion of the homeland. Churchill dramatically told his Cabinet that ‘if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground’.
A miracle was called for – and it arrived, in the shape of the Dunkirk evacuation. As soldiers fought a rearguard action to hold the Germans at bay, over 850 Royal Navy, Merchant Navy and volunteer civilian boats risked the Luftwaffe planes overhead to ferry troops back to England from Dunkirk. Astonishingly, 335,000 British and French troops were rescued between 27 May and 4 June. But all their equipment was left behind, much of it destroyed so as not to be of use to the enemy. As Churchill observed in his speech to the House of Commons on 4 June, ‘wars are not won by evacuations’. But Dunkirk seemed, nevertheless, a kind of deliverance. For Churchill it was a pretext for a show of defiance. It was also, in the final phrase of his speech, an appeal for transatlantic help, for a time when ‘the New World . . . steps forth to the rescue’.
I HAVE, MYSELF, FULL CONFIDENCE that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
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, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
By 16 June 1940, a new French government under Marshal Pétain was desperately suing for peace with Germany. Opportunistically, Italy, under its fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, had joined the war on Germany’s side, hoping to snap up French territory. Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway were already under Nazi sway. Even Churchill’s oratorical transformation of the Dunkirk evacuation into a ‘miracle of deliverance’ could not conceal the bleakness of the situation. A conquered France would mean German forces just across the English Channel – and so far, no country had withstood German attack. Having flown to France on 11 June, to plead in vain with French politicians to continue the fight, Churchill now addressed the House of Commons in a speech that was broadcast on 18 June. He made a last-ditch effort to bolster the Anglo-French alliance, referring to a rather fanciful union of the two countries; but, more realistically, he prepared the country for a ‘Battle of Britain’, in which victory would deliver ‘broad, sunlit uplands’, but defeat would mean ‘a new Dark Age’.
WE DO NOT YET KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN in France or whether the French resistance will be prolonged, both in France and in the French Empire overseas. The French government will be throwing away great opportunities and casting adrift their future if they do not continue the war in accordance with their treaty obligations, from which we have not felt able to release them. The House will have read the historic declaration in which, at the desire of many Frenchmen – and of our own hearts – we have proclaimed our willingness at the darkest hour in French history to conclude a union of common citizenship in this struggle. However matters may go in France or with the French government, or other French governments, we in this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede. Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians have joined their causes to our own. All these shall be restored.
What General Weygand [the French commander-in-chief] 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.’
Two months later, the ‘Battle of Britain’ – the largest aerial battle in history – neared its climax. Hitler was cautious about a sea invasion, especially since Britain’s navy remained strong. His pre-condition was absolute air superiority, and his sanguine Luftwaffe commander, Reichsmarschall Goering, assured him that this would be easy. It meant destroying Fighter Command – the branch of the RAF whose role was to shoot down enemy aircraft. Battle proper had commenced in mid-July, but the intensity had stepped up with the Luftwaffe’s mass attacks of Adler Tag (Eagle Day) on 13 August. By late August, German bombing raids against fighter airbases were relentless. They would stretch Britain’s defensive capability almost to breaking point.
Britain’s frontline air defence hinged on a very small number of men – the fighter pilots, whose life-and-death dogfights were often watched by the population below. Churchill had observed aerial action through his binoculars on several occasions, and on 16 August he was present in No. 11 Group’s operations room, which coordinated fighter forces over Southeast England. He found himself deeply moved by the efforts put in by the pilots and their ground organization. That day, he began elaborating the speech he would give four days later, which would honour both the fighter pilots and their less ‘glamorous’ bomber colleagues. After the speech, the Battle of Britain pilots were known simply as ‘the Few’.
THE GREAT AIR BATTLE which has been in progress over this island for the last few weeks has recently attained a high intensity. It is too soon to assign limits either to its scale or to its duration. We must certainly expect that greater efforts will be made by the enemy than any he has so far put forth.
. . . The gratitude of every home in our island, in our empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day. But we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.
When, from late 1944, the defeat of Nazi Germany looked inevitable, so the mutual interests of the Allies seemed set to diverge. One fact was undeniable: the western advance of the Soviet Red Army, combined with the Soviet Union’s huge suffering in the war, meant Stalin would expect a large zone of influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Churchill – who, despite the wartime alliance, regarded communism as corrosive and dangerous – became increasingly alarmed at the extent to which Stalin began foisting puppet regimes onto the countries he had occupied or ‘liberated’, despite agreements to restore pre-war governments or hold free elections.
In the immediate aftermath of war, Churchill – no longer prime minister, but still a statesman of renown – set out to articulate the dangers of the emerging power-bloc divide, the threat of Soviet expansionism, and the necessity of finding a route for peaceful coexistence in the nuclear age. When visiting the United States in March 1946, he used a degree ceremony at Fulton, Missouri, to voice his hopes for the new United Nations Organization and the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, as well as his fears about the ‘iron curtain’ that was descending across Europe.
A SHADOW HAS FALLEN upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain – and I doubt not here also – towards the peoples of all the Russias and a resolve to persevere through many differences and rebuffs in establishing lasting friendships. We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome, or should welcome, constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however . . . to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone – Greece with its immortal glories – is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern states of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control . . .
. . . The safety of the world . . . requires a new unity in Europe, from which no nation should be permanently outcast . . . Surely we should work with conscious purpose for a grand pacification of Europe, within the structure of the United Nations and in accordance with our Charter.