It was five years ago
on Thursday last that His Majesty the King commissioned me to form a
National Government of all parties to carry on our affairs. Five
years is a long time in human life, especially when there is no
remission for good conduct. However, this National Government was
sustained by Parliament and by the entire British nation at home and
by all our fighting men abroad, and by the unswerving co-operation of
the Dominions far across the oceans and of our Empire in every
quarter of the globe. After various episodes had occurred it became
clear last week that so far things have worked out pretty well, and
that the British Commonwealth and Empire stands more united and more
effectively powerful than at any time in its long romantic history.
Certainly we are - this is what may well, I think, be admitted by any
fair-minded person - in a far better state to cope with the problems
and perils of the future than we were five years ago.
For a while our prime enemy, our mighty enemy,
Germany, overran almost all Europe. France, who bore such a frightful
strain in the last great war, was beaten to the ground and took some
time to recover. The Low Countries, fighting to the best of their
strength, were subjugated. Norway was overrun. Mussolini's Italy
stabbed us in the back when we were, as he thought, at our last gasp.
But for ourselves - our lot, I mean - the British Commonwealth and
Empire, we were absolutely alone. In July, August and September 1940,
forty or fifty squadrons of British fighter aircraft in the Battle of
Britain broke the teeth of the German air fleet at odds of seven or
eight to one. May I repeat again the words I used at that momentous
hour: Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so
many to so few.' The name of Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding will
always be linked with this splendid event. But conjoined with the
Royal Air Force lay the Royal Navy, ever ready to tear to pieces the
barges, gathered from the canals of Holland and Belgium, in which a
German invading army could alone have been transported. I was never
one to believe that the invasion of Britain, with the tackle that the
enemy had at that time, was a very easy task to accomplish. With the
autumn storms, the immediate danger of invasion in 1940
passed.
Then began the blitz, when Hitler said he would
'rub out our cities.' That's what he said 'rub out our cities.' This
blitz was borne without a word of complaint or the slightest sign of
flinching, while a very large number of people - honour to them all -
proved that London could take it', and so could our other ravaged
centres. But the dawn of 1941' revealed us still in jeopardy. The
hostile aircraft could fly across the approaches to our Island, where
forty-six millions of people had to import half their daily bread and
all the materials they needed for peace or war: these hostile
aircraft could fly across the approaches from Brest to Norway and
back again in a single flight. They could observe all the movements
of our shipping in and out of the Clyde and Mersey, and could direct
upon our convoys the large and increasing numbers of U-boats with
which the enemy be-spattered the Atlantic - the survivors or
successors of which U-boats are now being collected in British
harbours.
The sense of envelopment, which might at any
moment turn to strangulation, lay heavy upon us. We had only the
Northwestern approach between Ulster and Scotland through which to
bring in the means of life and to send out the forces of war. Owing
to the action of Mr de Valery, so much at variance with the temper
and instinct of thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the
battle-front to prove their ancient valour, the approaches which the
Southern Irish ports and airfields could so easily have guarded were
closed by the hostile aircraft and U-boats. This was indeed a deadly
moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and
friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to
close quarters with Mr de Valery or perish for ever from the earth.
However, with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will
find few parallels, His Majesty's Government never laid a violent
hand upon them though at times it would have been quite easy and
quite natural, and we left the de Valery Government to frolic with
the Germans and later with the Japanese representatives to their
hearts content.
When I think of these days I think also of
other episodes and personalities. I think of Lieutenant-Commander
Esmonde, VC, or Lance-Corporal Connally, VC, and Captain Fegen, VC,
and other Irish heroes that I could easily recite, and then I must
confess that bitterness by Britain against the Irish race dies in my
heart. I can only pray that in years which I shall not see the shame
will be forgotten and the glories will endure, and that the peoples
of the British Isles as of the British Commonwealth of Nations will
walk together in mutual comprehension and forgiveness.
My friends, when our minds turn to the
North-Western approaches, we will not forget the devotion of our
merchant seamen, and our minesweepers out every night, and so rarely
mentioned in the headlines. Nor will we forget the vast, inventive,
adaptive, all-embracing and, in the end, all-controlling power of the
Royal Navy, with its ever more potent new ally, the air. These have
kept the life-line open. We were able to breathe; we were able to
live; we were able to strike. Dire deeds we had to do. We had to
destroy or capture the French fleet which, had it ever passed
undamaged into German hands, would, together with the Italian fleet,
have perhaps enabled the German Navy to face us on the high seas.
This we did. We had to make the dispatch to General Wavily all round
the Cape, at our darkest hour, of the tanks - practically all we had
in the Island - and this enabled us as far back as November 1940, to
defend Egypt against invasion and hurl back with the loss of a
quarter of a million captives and with heavy slaughter the Italian
armies at whose tail Mussolini had already planned to ride into Cairo
or Alexandria.
Great anxiety was felt by President Roosevelt,
and indeed by thinking men throughout the United States, about what
would happen to us in the early part of 1941 The President felt to
the depths of his being that the destruction of Britain would not
only be an event fearful in itself, but that it would expose to
mortal danger the vast and as yet largely unarmed potentialities and
the future destiny of the United States. He feared greatly that we
should be invaded in that spring of 1941, and no doubt he had behind
him military advice as good as any that is known in the world, and he
sent his recent Presidential opponent, the late Mr Wendell Willie, to
me with a letter in which he had written in his own hand the famous
lines of Longfellow which I quoted in the House of Commons the other
day.
We were, however, in a fairly tough condition
by the early months of 1941, and felt very much better about
ourselves than in those months immediately after the collapse of
France. Our Dun kirk army and field force troops in Britain, almost a
million strong, were nearly all equipped or reequipped. We had
ferried over the Atlantic a million rifles and a thousand cannon from
the United States, with all their ammunition, since the previous
June. In our munition works, which were becoming very powerful, men
and women had worked at their machines till they dropped senseless
from fatigue. Nearly one million of men, growing to two millions at
the peak, although working all day, had been formed into the Home
Guard. They were armed at least with rifles, and armed also with the
spirit 'Conquer or Die". Later in 1941, when we were still alone, we
sacrificed unwillingly, to some extent unwittingly, our conquests of
the winter in Cyrenaica and Libya in order to stand by Greece; and
Greece will never forget how much we gave, albeit unavailingly, of
the little we had. We did this for honour. We repressed the
German-instigated rising in Iraq. We defended Palestine. With the
assistance of General de Gaulle's indomitable Free French we cleared
Syria and the Lebanon of Vichyites and of German aviators and
intriguers. And then in June, I941, another tremendous world event
occurred. -
You have no doubt noticed in your reading of
British history and I hope you will take pains to read it, for it is
only from the past that one can judge the future, and it is only from
reading the story of the British nation, of the British Empire, that
you can feel a well-grounded sense of pride to dwell in these islands
- you
have sometimes noticed in your reading of
British history that we have had to hold out from time to time all
alone, or to be the mainspring of coalitions, against a continental
tyrant or dictator, and we have had to hold out for quite a long
time: against the Spanish Armada, against the might of Louis XIV,
when we led Europe for nearly twenty-five years under William III and
Marlborough, and I50 years ago, when Nelson, Pitt and Wellington
broke Napoleon, not without assistance from the heroic Russians of
I811. In all these world wars our Island kept the lead of Europe or
else held out alone.
And if you hold out alone long enough, there
always comes a time when the tyrant makes some ghastly mistake which
alters the whole balance of the struggle. On June 22 1941, Hitler
master as he thought himself of all Europe - nay, indeed, soon to be
master of the world, so he thought - treacherously, without warning,
without the slightest provocation, hurled himself on Russia and came
face to face with Marshal Stalin and the numberless millions of the
Russian people. And then at the end of the year Japan struck a felon
blow at the United States at Pearl Harbour, and at the same time
attacked us in Malaya and Singapore. Thereupon Hitler and Mussolini
declared war on the Republic of the United States.
Years have passed since then. Indeed every year
seems to me almost a decade. But never since the United States
entered the war have I had the slightest doubt but that we should be
saved, and that we only had to do our duty in order to win. We have
played our part in all this process by which the evil-doers have been
overthrown, and I hope I do not speak vain or boastful words, but
from Alamein in October 1942, through the Anglo-American invasion of
North Africa, of Sicily, of Italy, with the capture of Rome, we
marched many miles and never knew defeat. And then last year, after
two years' patient preparation and marvellous devices of amphibious
warfare - and mark you, our scientists are not surpassed in any
nation in the world, especially when their thought is applied to
naval matters - last year on June 6th we seized a carefully selected
little toe of German-occupied France and poured millions in from this
Island and from across the Atlantic, until the Seine, the Somme and
the Rhine all fell behind the advancing Anglo-American spearheads.
France was liberated. She produced a fine army of gallant men to aid
her own liberation. Germany lay open.
Now from the other side the mighty military
achievements of the Russian people, always holding many more German
troops on their front than we could do, rolled forward to meet us in
the heart and centre of Germany. At the same time, in Italy,
Field-Marshal Alexander's army of so many nations, the largest part
of which was British or British Empire, struck their final blow and
compelled more than a million enemy troops to surrender. This
Fifteenth Army Group, as we call it, British and Americans joined
together in almost equal numbers, are now deep in Austria, joining
their right hand with the Russians and their left with the United
States armies of General Eisenhower's command. It happened, as you
may remember - but memories are short - that in the space of three
days we received the news of the unlamented departures of Mussolini
and Hitler, and in three days also surrenders were made to
Field-Marshal Alexander and Field-Marshal Montgomery of over
2,500,000 soldiers of this terrible warlike German army.
I shall make it clear at this moment that we
never failed to recognise the immense superiority of the power used
by the United States in the rescue of France and the defeat of
Germany. For our part, British and Canadians, we have had about
one-third as many men over there as the Americans, but we have taken
our full share of the fighting, as the scale of our losses shows. Our
Navy has borne incomparably the heaviest burden in the Atlantic
Ocean, in the narrow seas and the Arctic convoys to Russia, while the
United States Navy has had to use its immense strength mainly against
Japan. We made a fair division of the labour, and we can each report
that our work is either done or going to be done. It is right and
natural that we should extol the virtues and glorious services of our
own most famous Commanders, Alexander and Montgomery, neither of whom
was ever defeated since they began together at Alamein. Both of them
have conducted in Africa, in Italy, in Normandy and in Germany-many,
battles of the first magnitude and of decisive consequence. At the
same time we know how great is our debt to the combining and unifying
command and high strategic direction of General Eisenhower.
And here is the moment when I pay my personal
tribute to the British Chiefs of the Staff; with whom I worked in the
closest intimacy throughout these heavy, stormy years. There have
been very few changes in this small, powerful and capable body of men
who, sinking all Service differences and judging the problems of the
war as a whole, have worked together in perfect harmony with each
other. In Field-Marshal Brooke, in Admiral Pound, succeeded after his
death by Admiral Andrew Cunningham, and in Marshal of the Air Portal,
a team was formed who deserved the highest honour in the direction of
the whole British war strategy and in its relations with that of our
Allies. It may well be said that our strategy was conducted so that
the best combinations, the closest concert, were imparted into the
operations by the combined staffs of Britain and the United States,
with whom, from Teheran onwards, the war leaders of Russia were
joined. And it may also be said that never have the forces of two
nations fought side by side and intermingled in the lines of battle
with so much unity, comradeship and brotherhood as in the great
Anglo-American Armies. Some people say: Well, what would you expect,
if both nations speak the same language, have the same laws, have a
great part of their history in common, and have very much the same
outlook upon life with all its hope and glory? Isn't it just the sort
of thing that would happen? And others may say: It would be an ill
day for all the world and for the pair of them if they did not go on
working together and marching together and sailing together and
flying together, whenever something has to be done for the sake of
freedom and fair play all over the world. That is the great hope of
the future.
There was one final danger from which the
collapse of Germany has saved us. In London and the south eastern
counties we have suffered for a year from various forms of
flying-bombs - perhaps you have heard about this - and rockets, and
our Air Force and our ack-ack batteries have done wonders against
them. In particular the Air Force turned on in good time on what then
seemed very slight and doubtful evidence, hampered and vastly delayed
all German preparations. But it was only when our Armies cleaned up
the coast and overran all the points of discharge, and when the
Americans captured vast stores of rockets of all kinds near Leipzig,
which only the other day added to the information we had, and when
all the preparations being made on the coasts of France and Holland
could be examined in detail, in scientific detail, that we knew how
grave had been the peril, not only from rockets and flying-bombs but
from multiple long range artillery which was being prepared against
London. Only just in time did the Allied armies blast the viper in
his nest. Otherwise the autumn of 1944, to say nothing of 1945, might
well have seen London as shattered as Berlin.
For the same period the Germans had prepared a
new U-boat fleet and novel tactics which, though we should have
eventually destroyed them, might well have carried anti-U-boat
warfare back to the high peak days of 1942. Therefore we must rejoice
and give thanks, not only for our preservation when we were all
alone, but for our timely deliverance from new suffering, new perils
not easily to be measured.
I wish I could tell you tonight that all our
toils and troubles were over. Then indeed I could end my five years'
service happily, and if you thought that you had had enough of me and
that I ought to be put out to grass, I tell you I would take it with
the best of grace. But, on the contrary, I must warn you, as I did
when I began this five years' task - and no one knew then that it
would last so long - that there is still a lot to do, and that you
must be prepared for further efforts of mind and body and further
sacrifices to great causes if you are not to fall back into the rut
of inertia, the confusion of aim, and the craven fear of being great.
You must not weaken in any way in your alert and vigilant frame of
mind. Though holiday rejoicing is necessary to the human spirit, yet
it must add to the strength and resilience with which every man and
woman turns again to the work they have to do, and also to the
outlook and watch they have to keep on public affairs.
On the continent of Europe we have yet to make
sure that the simple and honourable purposes for which we entered the
war are not brushed aside or overlooked in the months following our
success, and that the words 'freedom', 'democracy' and 'liberation'
are not distorted from their true meaning as we have understood them.
There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their
crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police
governments were to take the place of the German invaders. We seek
nothing for ourselves. But we must make sure that those causes which
we fought for find recognition at the peace table in facts as well as
words, and above all we must labour that the world organisation which
the United Nations are creating at San Francisco does not become an
idle name, does not become a shield for the strong and a mockery for
the weak. It is the victors who must search their hearts in their
glowing hours, and be worthy by their nobility of the immense forces
that they wield.
We must never forget that beyond all lurks
Japan, harassed and failing but still a people of a hundred millions,
for whose warriors death has few terrors. I cannot tell you tonight
how much time or exertions or what exertions will be required to
compel the Japanese to make amends for their odious treachery and
cruelty. We - like China, so long undaunted - have received horrible
injuries from them ourselves, and we are bound by the ties of honour
and fraternal loyalty to the United States to fight this great war at
the other end of the world at their side without flagging or failing.
We must remember that Australia and New Zealand and Canada were and
are all directly menaced by this evil Power. They came to our aid in
our dark times, and we must not leave unfinished any task which
concerns their safety and their future. I told you hard things at the
beginning of these last five years; you did not shrink, and I should
be unworthy of your confidence and generosity if I did not still cry:
Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is
done and the whole world is safe and clean.
источник: 
