(3 of 5)
But Churchill was not without accomplishment. He gave his countrymen exactly what he promised them—blood, toil, tears, sweat—and one thing more: untold courage. It was the last that counted, not only in Britain but in democracies throughout the world.
One evening just before year's end millions of U. S. citizens sat silent before their radios and heard their President identify the future of their country with the future of Great Britain. But more than six months before, when France was tottering, it was Winston Churchill who raised his brandy-harsh voice and made that identification real, saying: "We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old."
Anglo-American. As a symbol of Anglo-American unity Winston Churchill is a paradox because his Americanism is more British than American—more British, even, than average-British. This seven-month child of a British peer and an American heiress went back to Elizabethan times to find his spiritual forebears; he grew to maturity with a stomach for strong food and drink, with a lust for adventure, with a tongue and pen that shaped the English language into the virile patterns of a Donne, a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. His father he worshiped, but never got close to; his mother he respectfully admired.
He had money, a name and a flair for publicity; he had Lord Randolph Churchill's "force, caprice and charm"; and he had an incomparable gift for words. During his years of eclipse between the two World Wars he was an articulate and consistent critic of British Empire policy, the most feared politician in Britain by the narrow-minded men who made that policy. He was the one man in the British Empire most obviously equipped to lead the Empire in war, and it was small credit to Britain that he was not chosen to lead it until the Empire rocked on its heels.
The year 1940 found the man, as well as the man the year. It found him speaking, not only as a Briton, but as an American, taking his words from Oscar Hammerstein and Edna Ferber: "These two great organizations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking out upon the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on in full flood, inexorable, irresistible, to broader lands and better days."
War of Words. Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill are the two men alive in the world today who best understand the power of words as weapons of warfare. Their techniques are different. Hitler uses words as poison gas; Churchill uses them as a broadsword. Yet he, too, can be cunning. Last May he wrote a letter to Benito Mussolini couched in the sort of language Captain John Smith might have used to a savage chieftain: