Inspired by Winston Churchill

I’ve discovered an old 1970’s TV series called “The World at War” and have been enjoying it immensely – it has some excellent footage and brilliant narration from Laurence Olivier. I’m learning so much about the war that my parents talked about when I was a kid.

In last night’s episode, the fall of France was covered, and the desperate evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk. All of Europe had fallen to the Germans, and with America still neutral, Britain and her commonwealth partners stood alone against the Nazi war machine.

It was at this moment that Winston Churchill delivered one of his many great speeches, and the one which never ceases to amaze me for the way it captured a moment in history, but also inspired a whole nation to continue to fight against increasingly long odds.

Churchill’s assertion that “The battle of Britain” was about to begin proved to be correct. Following this speech the Luftwaffe spent weeks pounding the Royal Air Force and it’s airfields, before turning their bombers onto London, where they rained down bombs and incendiaries for 78 straight nights.

It was a long speech, delivered in the House of Commons, but it is the final few paragraphs which provided a nation with the motivation to keep going, and the final four words which came to sum up The Battle of Britain.

You can read the whole speech here, but for me this is the essence:

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.'