When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  His wit was a major part of how Churchill became, through his words, the embodiment of the British people during the war. Churchill did not really speak to the nation, as Roosevelt had done to America in the 1930s. Because at a time of war there really is only one issue, he spoke for them. Churchill had always idealised what, confusing his categories, he tended to call ‘the British race’. The Britain of his imagination was populated with fearless and gallant yeomen whose sense of honour and decency was invincible. The people were a more important part of the Second World War than of the First. The Great War had pitted soldiers against their adversaries. As he was to say in August, in the speech known as ‘The Few’, in the Second World War the air war meant that the morale of the home population was a vital part of the effort.

  Though, as Churchill said himself, ‘rhetoric was no guarantee of survival’, he revelled in the excitement. Not even Wellington, who really was a soldier, had worn uniform in office, as Churchill did. In the light blue livery of an honorary RAF commodore he even looked like the war. The cigar, the stovepipe hat, his fondness for red meat and wine for breakfast; the nation’s secret wish list. He even recorded the broadcast of this speech while smoking a cigar. The effect was to make him sound drunk, but 60 per cent of the nation heard it and it clearly worked. A Gallup poll conducted in July gave Churchill an approval rating of 88 per cent.

  This brings me, naturally, to the great question of invasion from the air, and of the impending struggle between the British and German Air Forces. It seems quite clear that no invasion on a scale beyond the capacity of our land forces to crush speedily is likely to take place from the air until our Air Force has been definitely overpowered. In the meantime, there may be raids by parachute troops and attempted descents of airborne soldiers. We should be able to give those gentry a warm reception both in the air and on the ground, if they reach it in any condition to continue the dispute. But the great question is: Can we break Hitler’s air weapon? Now, of course, it is a very great pity that we have not got an Air Force at least equal to that of the most powerful enemy within striking distance of these shores. But we have a very powerful Air Force which has proved itself far superior in quality, both in men and in many types of machine, to what we have met so far in the numerous and fierce air battles which have been fought with the Germans. In France, where we were at a considerable disadvantage and lost many machines on the ground when they were standing round the aerodromes, we were accustomed to inflict in the air losses of as much as two and two-and-a-half to one. In the fighting over Dunkirk, which was a sort of no-man’s-land, we undoubtedly beat the German Air Force, and gained the mastery of the local air, inflicting here a loss of three or four to one day after day … There remains, of course, the danger of bombing attacks, which will certainly be made very soon upon us by the bomber forces of the enemy. It is true that the German bomber force is superior in numbers to ours; but we have a very large bomber force also, which we shall use to strike at military targets in Germany without intermission. I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world. Much will depend upon this; every man and every woman will have the chance to show the finest qualities of their race, and render the highest service to their cause. For all of us, at this time, whatever our sphere, our station, our occupation or our duties, it will be a help to remember the famous lines: He nothing common did or mean, Upon that memorable scene. I have thought it right upon this occasion to give the House and the country some indication of the solid, practical grounds upon which we base our inflexible resolve to continue the war. There are a good many people who say, ‘Never mind. Win or lose, sink or swim, better die than submit to tyranny – and such a tyranny’. And I do not dissociate myself from them. But I can assure them that our professional advisers of the three Services unitedly advise that we should carry on the war, and that there are good and reasonable hopes of final victory.

  The uneasy relationship of rhetoric to truth has rarely come under closer scrutiny than in the perilous summer of 1940. Whether Churchill truly believed that the war was winnable is a moot point. His update is detailed and clear. He is at no point pretending that the threat is not grave. But his hopes for victory are not reportage; they are part of the quest for victory. If Churchill at times sounds more steadfast than he felt, that is the nub of his rhetorical task. This is a reminder that if we are too fastidious we can diminish our politics. A cynic who went through Churchill’s 1940 speeches with an eye to convicting him of misleading the House of Commons might be able to do so. Churchill is most definite when he knows least, and in this passage he trades heavily on his John Bull status as the representative of the nation. He is convinced, with the victory in the air over Dunkirk his only evidence, that the British Air Force is greater than its German rival despite its numerical inferiority.

  See too how Churchill decorates the speech with literature. He is quoting Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. Churchill often quoted without footnotes. His 4 June speech (‘We Will Fight Them on the Beaches’) cites Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur without acknowledging poet or poem. A man with a prodigious memory, Churchill had a mind stocked with the reading of a lifetime. His love affair with Shakespeare lasted all his life, and Churchill’s grand style, anachronistic even in his time, owes a lot to the metre he heard in Shakespeare. Violet Bonham Carter once complained that Churchill could not stop reciting the odes of Keats, which he had by heart. He could perform similar feats with long stretches of Dr Johnson and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. When Churchill stretches sentences over too great a distance it is Gibbon, the most overrated stylist of them all, whom he echoes. He was also a devotee of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

  The literary reference allows Churchill to move between the two different registers of this passage. One aspect of this speech is a calm and reasoned report that the military authorities have cause to expect victory. The second aspect is that this will not come without cost; the British will have occasion to show their virtue in giving themselves to the cause. There is an echo here of the epitaph speech that Pericles gives in the Funeral Oration. The conventional epitaph speech is comprised of praise for the dead and advice for the living. Churchill calls on the living to be worthy of that praise when their descendants look fondly back on them. But this is Pericles before the battle rather than after.

  We may now ask ourselves: In what way has our position worsened since the beginning of the war? It has worsened by the fact that the Germans have conquered a large part of the coast line of Western Europe, and many small countries have been overrun by them. This aggravates the possibilities of air attack and adds to our naval preoccupations … If Hitler can bring under his despotic control the industries of the countries he has conquered, this will add greatly to his already vast armament output. On the other hand, this will not happen immediately, and we are now assured of immense, continuous and increasing support in supplies and munitions of all kinds from the United States; and especially of aeroplanes and pilots from the Dominions and across the oceans coming from regions which are beyond the reach of enemy bombers. I do not see how any of these factors can operate to our detriment on balance before the winter comes; and the winter will impose a strain upon the Nazi regime, with almost all Europe writhing and starving under its cruel heel, which, for all their ruthlessness, will run them very hard. We must not forget that from the moment when we declared war on the 3rd September it was always possible for Germany to turn all her Air Force upon this country, together with any other devices of invasion she might conceive, and that France could have done little or nothing to prevent her doing so. We have, therefore, lived under this danger, in principle and in a slightly modified form, during all these months … Therefore, in casting up this
dread balance sheet and contemplating our dangers with a disillusioned eye, I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatever for panic or despair. During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment. That was our constant fear: one blow after another, terrible losses, frightful dangers. Everything miscarried. And yet at the end of those four years the morale of the Allies was higher than that of the Germans, who had moved from one aggressive triumph to another, and who stood everywhere triumphant invaders of the lands into which they had broken. During that war we repeatedly asked ourselves the question: How are we going to win? and no one was able ever to answer it with much precision, until at the end, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly, our terrible foe collapsed before us, and we were so glutted with victory that in our folly we threw it away.

  This whole speech is a clever dance between the unsparing and the sentimental. We get a passage of worrying clarity salvaged by inspirational optimism. Here Churchill does it again. He understands an important principle about rhetoric that lesser speakers get wrong – soft-pedalling on a crucial point gets you a reputation as a fraud. A reward greets being candid. The sense of inspiration in the speech is the greater precisely because the threat has been genuinely posed.

  In his first speech as prime minister, on 13 May 1940, Churchill had spoken briefly and had been unable to offer anything beyond ‘blood, toil, sweat and tears’ and the promise of victory no matter how hard the road might be. That speech was nothing more than a bag of tricks. But what a bag of tricks. Then, on 4 June 1940, Churchill returned to the House to describe the Dunkirk evacuation in all its sorry detail. In Churchill’s voice, of course, the evacuation sounded like the prelude to the forward march of progress. The 4 June speech was the rallying cry in which Churchill declared that whether the fight was waged on the beaches, on the seas, the oceans or the landing grounds, the British would never surrender.

  That is the background to the optimism in this speech which arrives fully formed at the end of this section. It is practically grounded in the military supplies from the United States and the fortitude of the Allied and Dominion men who had proved themselves in air battle. It is also based on asking his audience to recall the events of twenty-two years earlier when the Great War had been won, suddenly, against expectation. The implication is that the same will happen again.

  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 … 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 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.’

  For the first time Churchill stops reporting and raises himself to his full rhetorical height. Note, though, that a grand message does not demand grandiose language. Three-quarters of the words in this section are monosyllables. The message is, in summary, the same one he gave in each of his magnificent speeches in the summer of 1940: we confront the face of evil in the world, we have to save not only ourselves but all civilisation, there can be no victory short of extinction for the enemy. Triumph will come hard, but we are Britain, we can do it and we shall.

  That is a simple way of saying what Churchill says with consummate rhetorical effect. The ending teems with triplets and pairs in each sentence, the contrast between light and dark, alliterations and eight instances of the word ‘we’. Read it yourself and you feel the blood begin to stir with the three successive sentences that feature the word ‘battle’. The Battle of France is over, the battle of Britain (lower-case in Churchill’s transcript because it was not yet an event in the world) is about to begin, and then he widens the frame because the third battle puts civilisation on the line. Three battles – past, present and a battle for the future. The effect is clinched by the prospect that the verdict will be entered by men, which is to say all of mankind, who will, with gratitude, note our finest hour.

  The weight of events exerts its own pressure, but a poor speaker can throw the moment away. Here, every sentence is perfectly balanced. The sheet in front of Churchill at the despatch box had the text arranged with five-line paragraphs in indented type, as if it were the blank verse of the Old Testament Book of Psalms. The effect is as if ‘under the wand of a magician’, as the younger Pitt said of Fox. Look at the way each sentence sets up the next: the Battle of France is over; the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Then the final two sentences that flow inexorably on to their conclusion in the speech’s title. This is his finest hour. You are on fire, sir.

  RONALD REAGAN

  Tear Down This Wall

  The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin

  12 June 1987

  The most successful electoral politician of any era of American politics, Ronald Reagan was, to use a coinage of George W. Bush, the most mis-underestimated president of modern times. He was also, as much as Wilson and Eisenhower, a war leader. Reagan’s war was the Cold War and it ended in a decisive victory. The Cold War was a war of ideas, a war conducted through cultural imperialism and fine words. It ended with a victory for the abundance of Western capitalism over the poverty of the Soviet regime.

  Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911–2004) was born into a poor family in Tampico, Illinois. His early life was peripatetic until his parents settled in Dixon, Illinois, where his father opened a shoe store. Reagan began his career as a radio sports announcer in Iowa and then, in 1937, signed a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers for whom, over the next three decades, he appeared in more than fifty films. At the outbreak of war he was excused combat on account of his poor eyesight. He spent the war making training films and left the military ranked as a captain.

  From 1947 to 1952, Reagan, a liberal Democrat at the time, served as the president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. He was a fervent admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal he believed had provided jobs for his father and brother during the Depression. Reagan remained a Democrat until after he turned fifty, only switching his registration in 1962, and he never lost his admiration for FDR.

  The Screen Actors’ Guild gave him a new mission, though, namely to root out the communists, which began his rightwards drift. Reagan first appeared in national politics in 1964 with a well-received speech introducing the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. To a remarkable degree this speech foreshadowed his later career. He argued that government was eroding the freedom of individuals within the United States. ‘I have wondered at times’, said Reagan once, ‘what the Ten Commandments would have looked like if Moses had run them through the US Congress.’ He also decried the weakness of the American government against an expansive Soviet Union.

  Two years later Reagan won the governor
ship of California for the first time, and in 1970 he won a second term, although his presidential bids in 1968 and 1976 failed. When he did win the nomination, in 1980, he thrashed Jimmy Carter to become, at the age of sixty-nine, as yet the oldest president in American history. Reagan cut taxes and tried to lighten the burden of business regulation, and the economy boomed, but at the price of growing inequality between the rich and the poor and a large deficit. He was a charming advertiser of conservative values, but it was sleight of hand. His boom bust after he left office. His foreign adventures are a shambles. Reagan’s anti-communism was so severe that he upheld all manner of dubious military regimes in Latin America. The regimes in El Salvador and Nicaragua were not exactly shining cities on a hill, and in October 1983 Reagan ordered US forces to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada after Marxist rebels overthrew the government.

  But the most pressing issue for his presidency, with which Reagan will always be associated, was the Cold War. Reagan fortified the American arsenal of weapons and its reserve of troops against a Soviet Union that he described, in a speech in March 1983, as ‘the evil empire’. Providing aid to anti-communist movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America became known as the Reagan Doctrine.

  In November 1984 Reagan won a second landslide, carrying 49 of the 50 US states and 525 of the 538 electoral votes, the largest number ever won by an American presidential candidate. His second term was tarnished by the Iran–Contra affair, an arms-for-hostages deal with Iran to funnel money toward anti-communist insurgencies in Central America. Though he initially denied knowing about it, Reagan later announced that it had been a mistake.