How Churchill and the British Refused to Let Hitler Win

An island nation stood alone. Hitler had every intent to crush it. First by air and then by land invasion. Yet it refused to fold, refused to capitulate and refused to surrender. Churchill’s speeches of 1940 remain among the most poignant and inspiring ever made. He spoke the famous words as his nation faced near certain annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. Instead of despair, Churchill and the British people choose honor, defiance and the survival of democracy itself.

In Their Finest Hour, Churchill’s second of his six book series The Second World War, he picks where the first volume, The Gathering Storm, left off. After invading Poland, Hitler continued to violate the sovereignty of one European country after another. The Soviet pact with the Nazis meant a free hand for Stalin’s invasion of Finland. Denmark and Norway fell to the fascists followed by the Netherlands. Churchill took over as Prime Minister following Chamberlain losing the confidence of the House of Commons and the British people for his failed attempts at appeasement with Hitler.

By mid 1940, the situation was catastrophic for the British. The Battle of France had ended with the evacuation of British and French troops during “Operation Dynamo” more commonly known by the name of the port of embarkation that became a synonym for retreat – “Dunkirk”.

Superior Nazi equipment and the element of surprise helped them to blast through the French countryside in a “lightning” fashion known as Blitzkrieg or “lightning war” in German. A few days later Italy joined the Axis declaring war on Britain and France.

Rather than have Paris and the French people obliterated the French government chose to leave Britain alone to face the Nazi menace.

Flush with their rapid success as July began, Hitler and Goering (head of the German air force – the Luftwaffe) was certain that the Nazis could easily destroy English defenses and make way for an amphibious landing to invade the British Isles. This had been code named “Operation Sea Lion”. It’s clear from Churchill’s writing and correspondence that this wasn’t simply wishful thinking on the part of the leadership of the Third Reich but a very real possibility. As Churchill succinctly laid out in The Gathering Storm, Germany had surpassed the British in “air parity” and other aviation technology. It’s at this point in the war, more than any other, that the future of the human race was truly hanging in the balance. The Battle of Britain had begun.

Due not only to steely determination but growing competence in new tracking technologies, the ever important strength of the island nation’s navy and the blessed unpredictable weather patterns of the English Channel, the British were able to successfully fight off the Luftwaffe. Goering grudgingly decided to shift tactics and begin aerial bombardment of industrial centers, including most infamously Coventry in the Midlands, in order to stifle war production as well as the fighting spirit of the British.

As a part of The Blitz the Nazis began to heavily bomb London. Their Finest Hour is a work that is at its best when Churchill is describing his first hand accounts of working diligently in the center of London while bombs fell all around him, his staff and other essential workers in the city. These anecdotes epitomize the bravery and fearlessness of the British people.

Far from being cowed into submission, demoralized or capitulating, Churchill maintained an optimism and determination that is inspiring and legendary. He does not flinch in the included communiques to various cabinet members about the odds being against them yet he is never once defeatist, even when it really does seem that Britain might fall to the fascists.

He might have been forgiven for working out an armistice as others had in order to spare the British people the rage of the Luftwaffe. He might have been excused for giving up, having no guarantee that the United States would ever join the war and provide the needed supplies and equipment to help the Allies triumph. Yet standing all alone, facing bombardment, hardship, death and destruction, Churchill and the British people simply refused to let Hitler and the Nazis win. They recognized their historic position as the last stand against worldwide tyranny and the answered the call to fight to the death. Without Winston Churchill and the British people we would live in a very different world today.

As The Battle of Britain raged, Churchill also attended to various happenings in the Mediterranean and Africa. The sheer volume of correspondence and decisions made in so short a time is astonishing. One wonders when Churchill, or indeed any Briton, slept!

Slowly the tide begin to turn. Churchill continues to work calmly and diligently to get US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to send help in the form of ships, chiefly destroyers, ammunition and supplies. FDR was in a bind. He was up for re-election in November 1940 and the Neutrality Act passed by Congress after the First World War drastically tied his hands. It forbid sending assistance to any “belligerent” in a foreign conflict.

Despite a huge amount of sympathy for brave Britain, isolationism in the United States remained strong. FDR saw the British fighting alone and wanted to help, not only because it was morally right but because the collapse of the British and their empire into the hands of the Third Reich would be catastrophic for US interests.

FDR gets around the provisions by doing a “trade” of old First World War era destroyers for strategic bases around the world that will help the US protect those interests. It’s clear that this is embarrassing for Churchill, even 75+ years on through printed pages. To give up important territory of the British Empire for some old ships was not something to be celebrated, however needed they were. In the end he accepts it as a necessary evil. Yet in this acceptance is a foreshadowing of the eventual dissolution of the British Empire in the decades after 1945.

By the end of Their Finest Hour Churchill has left the reader at the end of the Battle of Britain but the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic. Hitler’s submarines, the infamous U-boats, were causing massive losses in shipping with no obvious end in sight. Once again Churchill turned to FDR who had since successfully won an unprecedented third term as US president. He was now able to stick his neck out and float the idea of “Lend-Lease” wherein an increasingly financially strapped Britain could “lease” needed supplies that the US would “lend” until the war’s completion at which time the equipment could be returned or compensated for.

In late December 1940 FDR made the case to an isolationist electorate that the US should be the “great arsenal of democracy” in its support for the British. His argument was only made possible by the resistance and perseverance of Churchill and the British people. Without the fighting spirit they showed when all alone, it would have been impossible to convince the US president, let alone the US people, that Britain had a good shot at winning and that the US efforts would not be wasted.

The very act of resisting and refusing to give up in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds helped save Britain, the United States and the world from fascist totalitarianism.