Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History

by Unknown

  The “We shall not flag or fail” peroration is as inspiring as any written in the twentieth century. He first sounds a note of defiance, “whatever the cost may be,” then uses “we shall fight” seven times, culminating in “we shall never surrender.” As a participant in World War I and as an historian, Churchill was surely familiar with the French leader Georges Clemenceau’s defiant formulation in 1918, translated as “I shall fight in front of Paris, within Paris, behind Paris.” Consciously or not, Churchill echoed that theme and improved on its rhythm in his unforgettable “We shall fight on the beaches… we shall fight in the fields and in the streets… we shall never surrender.” (This may be apocryphal, but in the roar of cheering and applause that followed in the House of Commons, he added in an aside to a colleague, “And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles, because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!”)

  Most orators would have ended on that high never-surrender note. But what makes Churchill’s peroration especially powerful is its double change of pace and mood at the end: first solemnly recognizing the terrible consequences of failure with Britons “subjugated and starving,” then ameliorating this depressing prospect with an expression of confidence that the New World—that is, the United States—supported by surviving British seapower, would “step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

  ***

  …WHEN A WEEK ago today I asked the House to fix this afternoon for the occasion of a statement, I feared it would be my hard lot to announce from this box the greatest military disaster of our long history.

  I thought, and there were good judges who agreed with me, that perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 men might be reembarked, but it certainly seemed that the whole French First Army and the whole British Expeditionary Force, north of the Amiens-Abbeville gap would be broken up in open field or else have to capitulate for lack of food and ammunition.

  These were the hard and heavy tidings for which I called on the House and nation to prepare themselves a week ago. The whole root and core and brain of the British Army, on which and around which we were to build, and are to build, the great British armies in the later years of the war, seemed due to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious and starving captivity….

  The surrender of the Belgian Army compelled the British Army at the shortest notice to cover a flank to the sea of more than thirty miles’ length which otherwise would have been cut off. In doing this and closing this flank, contact was lost inevitably between the British and two of three corps forming the First French Army, who were then further from the coast than we were. It seemed impossible that large numbers of Allied troops could reach the coast. The enemy attacked on all sides in great strength and fierceness, and their main power, air force, was thrown into the battle…. For four or five days the intense struggle raged. All armored divisions, or what was left of them, together with great masses of German infantry and artillery, hurled themselves on the ever-narrowing and contracting appendix within which the British and French armies fought.

  Meanwhile the Royal Navy, with the willing help of countless merchant seamen and a host of volunteers, strained every nerve and every effort and every craft to embark the British and Allied troops. Over 220 light warships and more than 650 other vessels were engaged. They had to approach this difficult coast, often in adverse weather, under almost ceaseless hail of bombs and increasing concentration of artillery fire. Nor were the seas themselves free from mines and torpedoes.

  It was in conditions such as these that our men carried on with little or no rest for days and nights, moving troops across dangerous waters and bringing with them always the men whom they had rescued. The numbers they brought back are the measure of their devotion and their courage. Hospital ships, which were plainly marked, were the special target for Nazi bombs, but the men and women aboard them never faltered in their duty.

  Meanwhile the Royal Air Force, which had already been intervening in the battle so far as its range would allow it to go from home bases, now used a part of its main metropolitan fighter strength to strike at German bombers…. The struggle was protracted and fierce. Suddenly the scene has cleared, the crash and thunder has momentarily, but only for the moment, died away…. A miracle of deliverance… is manifest to us all. The enemy was hurled back by the retreating British and French troops. He was so roughly handled that he dared not molest their departure seriously. The Royal Air Force decisively defeated the main strength of the German Air Force and inflicted on them a loss of at least four to one. And the navy, using nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds, carried over 335,000 men, French and British, from the jaws of death back to their native land and to the tasks which lie immediately before them.

  We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance which must be noted…. Can you conceive of a greater objective for the power of Germany in the air than to make all evacuations from these beaches impossible and to sink all of the ships, numbering almost 1,000? Could there have been an incentive of greater military importance and significance to the whole purpose of the war?

  They tried hard and were beaten back. They were frustrated in their task; we have got the armies away…. I will pay my tribute to these young airmen. The great French Army was very largely… cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousands of armored vehicles. May it not be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen?

  There never has been, I suppose, in all the history of the world such opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table and Crusaders have fallen back into distant days, not only distant but prosaic; but these young men are going forth every morning, going forth holding in their hands an instrument of colossal shattering power, of whom it may be said that “every morn brought forth a noble chance and every chance brought forth a noble deed.” These young men deserve our gratitude, as all brave men who in so many ways and so many occasions are ready and will continue to be ready to give their life and their all to their native land….

  Nevertheless, our thankfulness at the escape of our army with so many men, and the thankfulness of their loved ones, who passed through an agonizing week, must not blind us to the fact that what happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster….

  We are told that Hitler has plans for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, someone told him, “There are bitter weeds in England.” There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned….

  We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency, not only against enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nationalities but also against British subjects who may become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United Kingdom. I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, under the present circumstances, draw all the distinctions we should like to do. If parachute landings were attempted and fierce fighting attendant on them followed, those unfortunate people would be far better out of the way for their own sake as well as ours.

  There is, however, another class for which I feel not the slightest sympathy. Parliament has given us powers to put down fifth column activities with a strong hand, and we shall use those powers subject to the supervision and correction of the House without the slightest hesitation until we are satisfied, and more than satisfied, that this malignancy in our midst has been effectively stamped out.

  Turning once again to the question of invasion, there has, I will observe, never been a period in all those long centuries of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serious raids, could have been given to our people. In the days of Napoleon the s
ame wind which might have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet. There is always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befouled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants.

  Many are the tales that are told. We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver. I think no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a watchful, but at the same time steady, eye….

  We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, ride out the storm of war, 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. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s government, every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and their need, will defend to the death their native soils, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength, even though a large tract 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 nor 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. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the old.

  Stalin Commands the Soviet Peoples to Scorch the Earth Being Taken by Hitler’s Troops

  “To the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or a gallon of fuel.”

  Can an evil leader make a good speech? Of course; an example is Joseph Stalin’s stirring broadcast on July 3, 1941, as German troops blitzed across lightly defended Soviet borders in an invasion that began on June 22.

  Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, annexed the Baltic states in a Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, and invaded Finland. But his paranoid purges of the high command of the Red Army left his own forces poorly led, and—after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” (p. 964)—dismantled the cult of personality and revealed Stalin’s excesses—it became known that the dictator had been surprised and immobilized for days after the Nazi invasion.

  He felt called upon to explain why he had signed a nonaggression treaty with the men he now called “fiends and cannibals,” but after this diplomatic defensiveness, he turned to war. Ruthlessness against his own people was the order of the day: he castigated “whimperers and cowards” and equated rumormongers with enemy parachutists; few of his listeners doubted that what he called being “haled before a military tribunal” meant being summarily shot. Nevertheless, millions of Ukrainians welcomed Hitler’s troops at first as liberators from Stalin’s repression.

  What the West heard, however, was his order that “grain and fuel which cannot be withdrawn must without fail be destroyed”; this was characterized as the “scorched-earth policy,” a term first used in the Sino-Japanese war during the 1930s.

  ***

  COMRADES! CITIZENS! BROTHERS and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!

  The perfidious military attack on our fatherland, begun on June 22 by Hitler’s Germany, is continuing.

  In spite of heroic resistance of the Red Army, and although the enemy’s finest divisions and finest air force units have already been smashed and have met their doom on the field of battle, the enemy continues to push forward, hurling fresh forces into the attack.

  Hitler’s troops have succeeded in capturing Lithuania, a considerable part of Latvia, the western part of Byelorussia, and a part of the western Ukraine.

  The Fascist air force is extending the range of operations of its bombers and is bombing Murmansk, Orsha, Mogilev, Smolensk, Kiev, Odessa, and Sevastopol.

  A grave danger hangs over our country.

  How could it have happened that our glorious Red Army surrendered a number of our cities and districts to the Fascist armies?

  Is it really true that German Fascist troops are invincible, as is ceaselessly trumpeted by boastful Fascist propagandists? Of course not!

  History shows that there are no invincible armies, and never have been. Napoleon’s army was considered invincible, but it was beaten successively by Russian, English, and German armies. Kaiser Wilhelm’s German army in the period of the first imperialist war was also considered invincible, but it was beaten several times by Russian and Anglo-French forces, and was finally smashed by Anglo-French forces.

  The same must be said of Hitler’s German Fascist army today. This army has not yet met with serious resistance on the continent of Europe. Only on our territory has it met serious resistance, and if as a result of this resistance the finest divisions of Hitler’s German Fascist army have been defeated by our Red Army, it means that this army, too, can be smashed and will be smashed as were the armies of Napoleon and Wilhelm.

  As to part of our territory having nevertheless been seized by German Fascist troops, this is chiefly due to the fact that the war of Fascist Germany on the USSR began under conditions favorable for German forces and unfavorable for Soviet forces.

  The fact of the matter is that troops of Germany, as a country at war, were already fully mobilized, and 170 divisions hurled by Germany against the USSR and brought up to the Soviet frontiers were in a state of complete readiness, only awaiting the signal to move into action, whereas Soviet troops had little time to effect mobilization and move up to the frontiers.

  Of no little importance in this respect is the fact that Fascist Germany suddenly and treacherously violated the nonaggression pact she concluded in 1939 with the USSR, disregarding the fact that she would be regarded as an aggressor by the whole world. Naturally, our peace-loving country, not wishing to take the initiative of breaking the pact, could not resort to perfidy.

  It may be asked, How could the Soviet Government have consented to conclude a nonaggression pact with such treacherous fiends as Hitler and Ribbentrop? Was not this an error on the part of the Soviet government? Of course not!

  Nonaggression pacts are pacts of peace between two states. It was such a pact that Germany proposed to us in 1939. Could the Soviet government have declined such a proposal? I think that not a single peace-loving state could decline a peace treaty with a neighboring state even though the latter was headed by such fiends and cannibals as Hitler and Ribbentrop….

  What is required to put an end to the danger hovering over our country, and what measures must be taken to smash the enemy?

  Above all, it is essential that our people, the Soviet people, should understand the full immensity of the danger that threatens our country and abandon all complacency, all heedlessness, all those moods of peaceful, constructive work which were so natural before the war but which are fatal today, when war has fundamentally changed everything.

  The enemy is cruel and implacable. He is out to seize our lands watered with our sweat, to seize our grain and soil secured by our labor.

  He is out to restore the rule of landlords, to restore czarism, to destroy national culture and the national state existence of Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, Letts, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tartars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanians, and the other free peoples of the Soviet Union, to Germanize them, to convert them into slaves of German princes and barons.

  Thus the issue is one of life or death for the
Soviet state, for the peoples of the USSR: the issue is whether peoples of the Soviet Union shall remain free or fall into slavery.

  The Soviet people must realize this and abandon all heedlessness; they must mobilize themselves and reorganize all their work on new, wartime lines, when there can be no mercy to the enemy.

  Further, there must be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for panicmongers and deserters; our people must know no fear in the fight and must selflessly join our patriotic war of liberation, our war against the Fascist enslavers….

  The peoples of the Soviet Union must rise against the enemy and defend their rights and their land. The Red Army, Red Navy, and all citizens of the Soviet Union must defend every inch of Soviet soil, must fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages, must display the daring initiative and intelligence that are inherent in our people.

  We must organize all-round assistance to the Red Army, ensure powerful reinforcements for its ranks and supply of everything it requires; we must organize rapid transport of troops and military freight and extensive aid to the wounded.

  We must strengthen the Red Army’s rear, subordinating all our work to this cause; all our industries must be got to work with greater intensity to produce more rifles, machine guns, artillery, bullets, shells, airplanes; we must organize the guarding of factories, power stations, telephonic and telegraphic communications, and arrange effective air raid precautions in all localities.

  We must wage a ruthless fight against all disorganizers of the rear, deserters, panicmongers, rumormongers, exterminate spies, diversionists, enemy parachutists, rendering rapid aid in all this to our destroyer battalions. We must bear in mind that the enemy is crafty, unscrupulous, experienced in deception and dissemination of false rumors.

  We must reckon with all this and not fall victim to provocation. All who by their panicmongering and cowardice hinder the work of defense, no matter who they are, must be immediately haled before a military tribunal.