70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain

Ever has so much...

Heart felt thanks to the few.

Amen to that

A big thanks to people who helped our generation to where it is today. Albeit a small greedy arrogant few who don't respect the freedom we have.

Battle of Britain Sunday this year, on which there is to be a service of re-dedication, is 20 September. Adlertag or "Eagle Day" on which the Luftwaffe mounted their final, and greatest, assault took place on 15 September although the official end of the battle (when it merged into "The Blitz") is dated as 31 October 1940. Today marks the 70th anniversary of Churchill's 'Few" speech:

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, 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.

Churchill also named the battle (although it was mostly confined to the skies above Kent and Essex) before it had even begun in an earlier speech on 18 June (the anniversary of the Batlle of Waterloo) reviewing the Fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation in a peroration that launched a thousand book titles (including the second volume of his own war memoirs):

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."

We lost 348 pilots in about 14 - 15 weeks of combat. A further 133 were captured or posted as missing in action, and a further 422 wounded.

Besides the British losses, 29 Poles, 8 Czechs and 6 Belgians perished.

A special mention should be made of our then colonies who, although it was not their war, nevertheless sent many of their finest young men to fight for the "mother country".

20 Canadians, 14 Australians, 11 New Zealanders and 9 South Africans made the ultimate sacrifice for those of us alive today.

Later of course, many times more would be killed serving in Bomber Command, but the politicians then (as now) sent better men to fight & die, then deny all reponsibility for their actions.

We owe every single one of those airmen our respect and gratitude.

" At the going down of the sun,
and in the morning,
we will remember them"

The verse that sums up what the BoB (andWWII) was about from the point of view of those fighting it:

For Johnny by John Pudney

Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air;
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground.
Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.

Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.

The British Empire and its Commonwealth didn't end up lasting for a thousand years, but Churchill's rallying cry turned out to be true - this was indeed their finest hour.

Growler wrote:We lost 348 pilots in about 14 - 15 weeks of combat. A further 133 were captured or posted as missing in action, and a further 422 wounded.

Besides the British losses, 29 Poles, 8 Czechs and 6 Belgians perished.

A special mention should be made of our then colonies who, although it was not their war, nevertheless sent many of their finest young men to fight for the "mother country".

20 Canadians, 14 Australians, 11 New Zealanders and 9 South Africans made the ultimate sacrifice for those of us alive today.

Later of course, many times more would be killed serving in Bomber Command, but the politicians then (as now) sent better men to fight & die, then deny all reponsibility for their actions.

We owe every single one of those airmen our respect and gratitude.

" At the going down of the sun,
and in the morning,
we will remember them"

Neat piece Growler. Well done.

The ultimate triumph of good over evil.

They should still have our gratitude.

Best non-cricket thread of the week.

Hass wrote:The British Empire and its Commonwealth didn't end up lasting for a thousand years, but Churchill's rallying cry turned out to be true - this was indeed their finest hour.

The British Empire didn't but the Commonwealth's still going when I last looked (even countries which weren't British colonies like Cameroon and Mozambique have joined). Both lasted longer than the 'Thousand-Year Reich' fortunately. Also Churchill did say "if".

Churchill's prescience in foreseeing how the summer of 1940 would work out is quite remarkable. Here's a passage from his speech on 4 June, after the Dunkirk evacuation had concluded, better known as his "We shall fight them on the beaches" address:

When we consider how much greater would be our advantage in defending the air above this island against an overseas attack, I must say that I find in these facts a sure basis upon which practical and reassuring thoughts may rest. I will pay my tribute to these young airmen. The great French Army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousands of armoured vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never had been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into a prosaic past: not only distant but prosaic; but these young men, going forth every morn to guard their native land and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power, of whom it may be said that

When every morning brought forth a noble chance
And every chance brought forth a noble knight

deserve our gratitude, as do all of the brave men who, in so many ways and on so many occasions, are ready, and continue ready, to give life and all for their native land.

The quotation is a slightly misrembered version of two lines from Tennyson's Morte de'Arthur

skully wrote:The ultimate triumph of good over evil.

what good ?

buckSH wrote:

skully wrote:The ultimate triumph of good over evil.

what good ?

So I was right when I guessed you're an Indian Nazi Party supporter (link) a few months ago? Not surprised in the least by that.

Those 1940 speeches by Churchill are the most impressive that I have ever read or heard.

My favourite section is not the most famous but is quite stunningly brilliant.

“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.”

It would have been natural to provide a stirring call to arms and to come out with something along the lines of “we will beat the bastards”. Instead the highlighted sentence incorporated everyone into a task which would be incredibly difficult and may or may not succeed. Magnificent stuff. This is beautifully understated, direct, so honest that I can’t see how anyone on our side would have remain uninspired.

The next verse of that speech then produced the required call to arms. It is rather more well known and also rather good:

“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”

Can Ange or Frommie fix the thread title, please? It sort of takes the gloss off a worthy thread.

Worthy to all except Bucky, of course.

Churchill's famous peroration at the end of his 4 June speech that TYA quotes above echoes a similar passage in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, a writer of whom Churchill was, unsurprisingly, a great admirer.

Whilst I fervently believe that the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was an infinitely preferable outcome to the alternative we should be careful not to dismiss Bucky's comment out of hand. WWII was not a war of dictatorship versus democracy. We were allied for much of the war with a tyranny possibly even more brutal than that of Hitler which was allowed to enslave half of Europe for over 40 years afterwards.

We went to the aid of Greece, then ruled by a dictator, Metaxas, and used bases in the Azores supplied by the fascist dictator of Portugal, Salazar. A democracy, Finland, sided with the Nazis and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 after having itself been attacked in 1939 and, as a consequence, was forced to pay reparations to its assailant after the war.

The Western Powers (including the USA) and the Soviet Union assisted in both German rearmament and the rise of Nazism before WWII. Stalin and Hitler had colluded in the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union was Germany's principal supplier of raw materials right upto the beginning of Barbarossa in June 1941.

Churchill himself had admired Mussolini who, unlike Hitler, he had met, for the order and stability he had brought to Italy. He believed in appeasing Japan (although he had agreed with Roosevelt at the Placentia Bay Conference in August 1941 to join in a war against Japan if the US was attacked although such an obligation was invalidated by the Japanese attacks on Hong Kong and Malaya simultaneous with the assault on Pearl Harbour).

As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s he had refused to fund the proper defence of Singapore as he did not believe in the possibility of a war with Japan "in my lifetime". As a consequence in February 1942 over 200,000 British and Commonwealth troops were delivered to a 3 1/2 year brutal captivity during which many of them perished.

However Churchill also believed that there was nothing inevitable about the conflict. On the contrary he believed it had been totally avoidable. When Roosevelt asked him what the war should be called (the Great War - originally applied to the war against Napoleon - still being in use to describe what we now call the First World War) he replied instantly, "The Unnecessary War". Churchill also voiced his belief in public. This is what he said during his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946:

There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented, in my belief, without the firing of a single shot...but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool

Whilst honouring the courage and sacrifice of those who fell or were disabled in the conflict we should bear those words in mind and remember the errors and misjudgments that allowed it all to happen and permitted what Churchill described, in his broadcast on the evening of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union as:

the terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilised world so foolishy, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing...

to come into being in the first place.

In Churchill's speech to a Joint Session of the US Congress in December 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbour and Hitler's declaration of war on the US there is the following passage which has extraordinary resonance for the post-9/11 world we currently inhabit:

Twice in a single generation the catastrophe of world war has fallen upon us; twice in our lifetime has the long arm of fate reached across the ocean to bring the United States into the forefront of the battle. If we had kept together after the last War, if we had taken common measures for our safety, this renewal of the curse need never have fallen upon us.

Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, to mankind tormented, to make sure that these catastrophes shall not engulf us for the third time? It has been proved that pestilence may break out in the Old World, which carry their destructive ravages into the New World, from which, once they are afoot, the New World cannot by any means escape. Duty and prudence alike command first that the germ-centres of hatred and revenge should be constantly and vigilantly surveyed and treated in good time, and, secondly, that an adequate organisation should be set up to make sure that the pestilence can be controlled at its earliest beginnings before it spreads and rages throughout the entire earth.

Of course in the last sentence he was referring to what became the United Nations (a term then used to describe those nations in conflict with the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan - copied by Churchill from his ancestor, Marlborough, who used it to describe the opponents of Louis XIV). We might question whether that organisation can be described as "adequate" today but that's another topic.

So all the non truckling was for nothling Allan?

I don't think that was my point but it's for you to make your own mind up.

well played fromage.

If only KP could have been as great as the brave pilots of the RAF.

You mean he would have been shot down in flames years ago?

Excerpt from Churchill's 'Few' speech of 15 August 1940. Unusually, its most famous line occurs in the middle rather than the peroration. Interesting to note his sarcastic reference to "the Fuhrer's reputation for veracity" using words of classical origin, also his reference to the Russian Air Force as well as his announcement of the decision to lease bases to the US (but with no reference to the 50 WWI destroyers Britain received in return) with the heavy implication at the end that the Americans would sort everything out for us eventually: