Churchill Standing Up Against Hitler
TUESDAY, MAY 28, 1940
It was a warm day in London, and inside the corridors of government, Winston Churchill was engaged in a heated argument that would determine the course of human history. The war in Europe had been raging for eight months, and the future looked grim. The retreat from Dunkirk had begun. France was on the verge of falling to the Nazis. Great Britain looked like it could be next.
Days prior, amid the carnage, Mussolini’s Italy had reached out offering to mediate a deal with Hitler’s Germany. The question on the table: Should the British government accept?
For three consecutive days, in front of an audience of government ministers, observe writers Brett and Kate McKay, Churchill had gone back and forth with his foreign secretary, the pragmatic Lord Halifax, who leaned toward accepting the Italian overture and preparing for a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany.
Churchill, who had become prime minister only a few weeks earlier, was dead set against such a move, saying that nations “which surrendered tamely were finished.” Over the course of nine different meetings, he had tried reasoning with the members of his war cabinet. He had tried logos, yet they were still split between him and Halifax. So it was time for pathos—for a last-ditch emotional appeal.
He now stood before his cabinet, ready to deliver one final speech before the group would decide the matter. As his biographer Boris Johnson writes, Churchill began his remarks “calmly enough.”
I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man [Hitler]. But it [is] idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called disarmament—our naval bases, and much else.
Then he raised the temperature, highlighting the existential stakes of their decision.
We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up … And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side we have immense reserves and advantages.
There was only one option, in Churchill’s mind. And as he reached his climactic finale, to quote Johnson, it was “almost Shakespearean.”
And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
Suddenly, the assembled ministers were cheering! Within moments they had left their seats and gathered around Churchill, patting him on the back in total support. Halifax was defeated. The prime minister’s grand finale had won the argument—and, say the McKays, “won the day.” “Then and there,” wrote historian John Lukacs in his landmark work, Five Days in London: May 1940, “he saved Britain, and Europe, and Western civilization.”
Mehdi Hasan. Win Every Argument — Mehdi Hasan (pp. 270-271). Kindle Edition.
From the notebook