WORDS THAT WON THE WAR
Acutely aware Britain’s fate lay in his ability to rouse the nation, Churchill summoned up oratory unmatched in history. No wonder audiences are cheering his speeches in a new film!
AT SOME cinemas where the new film Darkest Hour is being shown, it is reported that audiences have been standing and applauding Churchill’s great orations, as delivered by star Gary Oldman.
This response is surely prompted by the perception of a chasm between the language of the Greatest Englishman, and the faltering, apologetic, banal and frequently craven pronouncements of the politicians of today.
Churchill mobilised our language for war in an unprecedented fashion, assisted by the fact that his finest hour took place in the age of radio broadcasting and mass-circulation newspapers alas unavailable to Henry V, Elizabeth I or prime minister William Pitt.
Churchill’s leadership and speech-making in 1940 changed the course of history.
I would take issue with the makers of Darkest Hour, who suggest — especially in an invented scene where Churchill meets ‘ordinary people’ on the London Underground — that by his defiance of Hitler, he merely gave effect to the mood of the British nation. On the contrary, until Churchill told them what to think, in the summer of 1940 his countrymen were pretty bewildered.
His understanding of the common man and woman was pretty slight, because he never conversed with them save in the guise of valets, chauffeurs and suchlike. He was oblivious to the fact that the polling organisation Mass Observation found many British people in the winter of 1939-40 could not understand why the war was being carried on.
It had been started to save Poland and Poland was a goner: they hoped that some deal might be stitched up with Herr Hitler.
On May 23, 1940, a Norfolk girl named Muriel Green, who worked in her family’s garage, recorded a conversation on a tennis court with a grocer’s roundsman who said: ‘I think they’re going to beat us, don’t you?’ A schoolmaster agreed, but added that since the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected ‘we’d still be able to play tennis if they did win’.
Muriel wrote: ‘We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade. After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for two hours, and forgot all about the war.’
THERE was plenty of defeatism higher up the scale. Captain Ralph Edwards, director of naval operations at the Admiralty, wrote in his diary on June 23: ‘Our Cabinet with that idiot Winston in charge changes its mind every 24 hours. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion we’re so inept we don’t deserve to win, and indeed are almost certain to be defeated.’
It is essential to grasp all this; to understand that foreign secretary Lord Halifax — the ‘Holy Fox’ as Churchill derided him — was far from the only person who, after Dunkirk, saw no hope of successfully defying Hitler.
Churchill, in 1940, had to climb a mountain to convince not only the Americans and the world, but also his own people, that they must resist Nazism to the end, in defiance of every rational calculation of the odds.
With the British Army disarmed — many of its formations would not become fully equipped even until 1944 — his words became the foremost weapons of the British Empire. And what words they were!
We should be captivated not merely by the set-piece speeches, but also by spontaneous utterances to his intimate circle.
Most great men are cold fish. Churchill was almost unique in his warmth, displayed to his young private secretary John Martin, to whom he apologised for sometimes speaking roughly, laying a hand on his shoulder and saying: ‘I may seem very fierce, but I am fierce only with one man: Hitler.’
Another secretary, Jock Colville, described how at Chequers on the warm summer night of June 15, 1940, even as fresh tidings of disaster came, Churchill displayed the highest spirits, ‘repeating poetry, dilating on the drama of the present situation . . . offering everybody cigars, and spasmodically murmuring “Bang, bang, bang, bang goes the farmer’s gun, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run”.’
In the early hours of the morning, when U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy telephoned, the prime minister unleashed a torrent of rhetoric about America’s opportunity to save civilisation. He held forth about Britain’s growing fighter strength, ‘told one or two dirty stories’ and departed for bed at 1.30am, saying ‘goodnight, my children’.
At least some of this must have been masquerade, but it was a masquerade of awesome nobility.
Consider the tones he sometimes adopted to the Commons, where, in 1940, he commanded more confidence on the Labour benches than the Conservative ones.
After telling MPs that, for security reasons, the House’s sittings would no longer be advertised, he added wryly: ‘We ought not to flatter ourselves by imagining that we are irreplaceable, but it cannot be denied that two or three hundred by-elections would be a quite needless complication of our affairs at this juncture.’
After visiting Fighter Command’s 11 Group Operations Room on August 16, at the height of the Battle of Britain, his chief of staff ‘Pug’ Ismay made a remark as they drove back to Chequers. Churchill said: ‘Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.’
Silence followed for a few minutes, then he proclaimed that famous phrase: that never had ‘so much been owed by so many to so few’. Ismay wrote later: ‘The words burned into my brain,’ and of course Britain’s prime minister thereafter shared them with the world, and with history.
His humanity was wondrous, even with Britain at its last gasp. Even when discussing his vision of a post-war world, after hearing others demand a terrible vengeance upon Hitler’s nation, he dissented, saying: ‘We [have] got to admit that Germany should remain in the European family. Germany existed before the Gestapo.’
Some of his most marvellous rhetoric was deployed towards the Americans, whose belligerence was indispensable to any hope of victory.
During the anguished, protracted period of U.S. neutrality, he said in a transatlantic radio broadcast: ‘A wonderful story is unfolding before our eyes. How it will end, we are not allowed to know. But on both sides of the Atlantic we all feel — I repeat, all — that we are a part of
it; that our future and that of many generations is at stake.
‘We are sure that the character of human society will be shaped by the resolves we take and the deeds we do.’
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘Like a great actor upon the stage of history, he speaks his lines with a large, unhurried and stately utterance in a blaze of light, as is appropriate to a man who knows that his work and his person will remain the objects of scrutiny to many generations.’
Indeed, Churchill’s words and deeds were so marvellous that I can never understand why screenwriters feel a need to invent spurious ones. I’m uncomfortable with Gary Oldman’s portrayal, partly because his Churchill sometimes displays the bumblings of senility, which the prime minister certainly did in 1944-45, but never in 1940.
OUR wartime leader seemed incapable of opening his mouth without delivering a jewel of language. When a woman presented herself at the door of No 10 Downing street to offer a £60,000 necklace to the exchequer, Churchill quoted Macaulay: ‘romans in rome’s quarrel / spared neither land nor gold.’
He repeatedly murmured the lines of Lovelace on the execution of Charles I: ‘He nothing common did nor mean / Upon that memorable scene.’
seldom has a great actor on the stage of human affairs been so mindful of how his words and actions would be viewed by posterity. But without those words we would have been lost. a different British prime minister — Halifax, Chamberlain, even eden — could easily in the summer of 1940 have persuaded the British people that logic and the preservation of some portion of the empire made necessary a parley with Hitler; effectively, a surrender.
Churchill alone convinced the nation that Nazism represented an evil so absolute that it must be resisted to the very end, no matter the cost.
a few years ago, when I was writing my book about Churchill at war, I encountered a letter from a woman named eleanor spilsby, an elderly psychology lecturer living in south London.
she wrote to a friend in america on July 23, 1940: ‘We are proud to have the honour of fighting alone for things that matter more than life and death.
‘It makes me hold my chin high to think, not just of being english, but of having been chosen to come at this hour for this express purpose of saving the world . . . There is surprisingly little anger or hate in this business — It is just a job that has to be done . . . This is armageddon.’
Here was the peerless spirit of Britain at that time, magicked into being by the words and leadership of Winston Churchill, which almost eight decades later prompt some cinema audiences to rise and applaud them.
FINEST Years: Churchill As Warlord 1940-45 by Max Hastings is published by HarperPress at £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99 (offer valid to January 27), visit mailshop. co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. P&P is free on orders over £15.