Never Give In! Read Free

appeasement. By the time of the Munich crisis (September 1938) – when the governments of Britain and France sold down the river the liberties of the Czechoslovak peoples in a shameful attempt to buy time for themselves – Churchill could count on the fingers of one hand his true political friends and allies in Parliament.
    Though 1940 and his wartime years as Prime Minister were, undoubtedly, his glory years, it is my belief that, in terms of moral courage and dogged determination, Winston Churchill’s finest hour was in the late 1930s when, reviled by his Party, and denounced as a ‘war monger’, he continued his valiant though vain battle to alert the British people to the impending danger, convinced that united and decisive joint action by the former Allies – Britain, France and the United States – could stop Hitler in his tracks and, even as late as 1936, that it could do so without a shot being fired.
    After Munich - the point at which Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proudly proclaimed that he had in his hand a piece of paper, bearing the signatures of Herr Hitler and his own, vowing that Britain and Germany would never go to war again – the scales slowly fell off his fellow countrymen’s eyes, as Hitler’s brazen determination to tear up not only the Treaties that had ended the First World War, but all Agreements he had subsequently entered into, became increasingly apparent.
    Finally, the tide of public opinion began to turn against the architects of Appeasement, and a growing ground swell of public opinion came to be heard, demanding Winston Churchill’s return to high office. However it was not until 3 September 1939 – the very day the Second World War was declared and as Hitler’s tank armies invaded and occupied Poland – that Winston Churchill was called back to his old post as First Lord of the Admiralty and charged with the task of preparing the Royal Navy for war with Germany for the second time in a quarter century. In the instant of his return to the Admiralty the signal was flashed to the Fleet: ‘Winston is back.’ As he himself recounted in his War Memoirs:
So it was that I came again to the room that I had quitted in pain and sorrow almost a quarter century before . . . Once again we must fight for life and honour against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined and ruthless German race. Once again! So be it.
    How quickly the world forgets – and the younger generation almost certainly has no idea – that it was Britain and France who declared war on Nazi Germany, for the violation and invasion of Poland, with which they were bound by a treaty of alliance.
    There followed the so-called ‘phoney’ war, in which on the Western Front there was no opening of hostilities on land, though at sea the war was very real. It was not until 10 May 1940 that Hitler felt strong enough to launch his blitzkrieg against France, Belgium and Holland. On that same day, as the rising political storm in Britain swept Chamberlain from office, Winston Churchill was invited to become Prime Minister.
    Far from being daunted by the task that lay ahead, Churchill was exhilarated. As he confided in his War Memoirs:
As I went to bed at 3.00 am, I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
    In the absence of any effective armaments, beyond the power of the Royal Navy at sea and the fledgling, but as yet untested, Royal Air Force in the skies, Winston Churchill deployed his powers of oratory in all their simplicity, majesty and eloquence. Those who had refused to heed his blunt warnings of harsh reality in the peace-time years of the 1930s became his avid listeners and partisans once battle was joined. Churchill was shocked by the speed with which, in quick succession, the Belgian and French governments