Never Give In! Read Free Page A

surrendered to Hitler. He was utterly determined that Great Britain would not succumb in the same way.
    I recall my late mother, Ambassador Pamela Harriman, telling me about those critical days in late May and early June of 1940, as the British Army fell back on Dunkirk and retreated across the Channel, France was falling and Hitler prepared to launch Operation ‘Sealion’ – codeword for his invasion of Britain. My mother, just 20 years old and six months pregnant with me, was living with her in-laws at 10 Downing Street. They would normally dine early, frequently just my mother and my grandparents together as, by 9.30 or 10.00 p.m., the first air raid warnings would sound and my mother and I would be sent to the basement.
    She related how, one evening, the Prime Minister was brooding at the dinner table, preoccupied with his thoughts. Nothing was said. Suddenly he drew his eyes into sharp focus on to my mother’s and growled fiercely: ‘If the Hun comes, I am counting on each one of you to take one with you before you go!’ ‘But Papa,’ exclaimed my mother, ‘I don’t have a gun and, even if I did, I would not know how to use it.’ ‘But, my dear,’ rejoined my grandfather, his voice increasing in power and menace, and with his fist held high: ‘You can go to the kitchen and grab a carving knife!’ Though he never used such direct language in addressing the British people, it was with that same spirit that he inspired the nation.
    Now, at last, the nation was eager to listen, and willing to follow his lead, as he evoked and proclaimed their innermost instincts. Though it might be against all reason, they came to share Churchill’s conviction that, come what may, we could survive in our island, succoured by our Commonwealth and Empire across the seas and, soon, with the powerful material support of the United States under the Lend-Lease Agreement.
    But Churchill was sufficient of a realist to know that, on her own, Britain did not have the strength to liberate the nations of Occupied Europe and defeat Nazi Germany. His game-plan was simple: to play for time and hold out until the ‘Great Republic across the seas’ as he fondly called America, the land of his mother’s birth, could be persuaded to join the fray. Many of his speeches were aimed at engaging not only the material support but the active involvement of the United States.
    In his Address to the House of Commons (18 June 1940) in what has come to be known as the ‘Finest Hour’ speech he famously declared:
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 civilisation. 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 the 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!’
    It would be difficult to exaggerate the sense of profound relief that swept over him when, some 18 months later, he heard of the Japanese attack on the US Fleet at Pearl Harbor, sure in the knowledge that America would now be engaged ‘up to the neck and to the death’. From that moment onwards, Churchill never doubted the victorious outcome of the Allied cause but – already three years before the hour of victory – he had become deeply anxious about what would be the