Given the highly uncertain state of the world, I’ve been re-reading Churchill’s multi-volume Second World War memoir. I’ve just finished The Gathering Storm (covering the run up to war) and Their Finest Hour (covering the Battles of France and Britain in 1940).
To understand the background involved, note that Churchill was out of power for most of the 1930s and was largely despised by the political establishment for his incessant attacks on their weakness and appeasement. Through friends and informants he kept close tabs on the inner councils and understood better than most the slow drift toward chaos and war.
In The Gathering Storm, Churchill described his emotions upon learning of Anthony Eden’s resignation from Chamberlain’s cabinet in February 1938. Eden was Foreign Secretary and was the one member of Chamberlain’s cabinet actively trying to prevent further appeasement. Churchill recounts his mortal fear when he understood that there was no possibility of checking Hitler’s evil pretensions short of all-out war:
Late in the night of February 20 a telephone message reached me as I sat in my old room at Chartwell . . . that Eden had resigned. . . . During all the war soon to come and in its darkest times I never had any trouble in sleeping. . . . I slept sound and awoke refreshed, and had no feelings except appetite to grapple with whatever the morning’s boxes might bring. But now on this night of February 20, 1938, and on this occasion only, sleep deserted me. From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, or wrong measurements and feeble impulses. My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in many ways; but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation, the grand old British race that had done so much for men, and had yet some more to give. Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.
The day after Hitler invaded Poland, Chamberlain invited Churchill back into the cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill served in this capacity until he took over as Prime Minister in May 1940, just prior to Hitler’s invasion of France. Then followed the disastrous collapse of France, the British evacuation of 450,000 of its own and French soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk and hasty and nervous preparations for the expected invasion of Britain. As Churchill makes clear in Their Finest Hour, the future was by no means certain. While the expected invasion never occurred (Hitler postponed Operation “Sealion” repeatedly until it became militarily moot), Churchill described the impending Battle of Britain – with all its possibilities for slaughter – in clear and frightening prose:
I have often wondered, however, what would have happened if two hundred thousand German storm troops had actually established themselves ashore. The massacre would have been on both sides grim and great. There would have been neither mercy nor quarter. They would have used terror, and we were prepared to go all lengths. I intended to use the slogan, “You can always take one with you.” I even calculated that the horrors of such a scene would in the last resort turn the scale in the United States. But none of these emotions was put to the proof. Far out on the grey waters of the North Sea and the Channel coursed and patrolled the faithful, eager flotillas peering through the night. High in the air soared the fighter pilots, or waited serene at a moment’s notice around their excellent machines. This was a time when it was equally good to live or die.
I hope and pray that we in the United States – and indeed what has come to be called ‘The Western World’ – are not sleepwalking our way to disaster. I hope that we will not be faced with the terrible choices faced by Churchill and the British people in those days when Britain stood completely alone.
To complete my funereal mood, here’s the peroration of Churchill’s famous speech in the Commons on June 18, 1940, when all was dark:
What General Weygand 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.”
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