With the German Army holding a coastline opposite the British Isles last week almost as long as from Maine to Florida, Prime Minister Winston Churchill rose in the House of Commons to make an address describing the Allies' defeat in Flanders, stating losses ascertained after the Dunkirk evacuation, but declaring the determination of the Empire to fight to victory. Mr. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, wrote one of the brilliant histories of that struggle, The World Crisis. His last week's speech to Parliament is a vivid and eloquent chapter in the history to be written of World War II. It follows: From the moment when the defenses at Sedan on the Meuse were broken at the end of the second week in May only a rapid retreat to Amiens and the south could have saved the British-French Armies who had entered Belgium at the appeal of the Belgian King.
This strategic fact was not immediately realized. The French High Command hoped it would be able to close the gap. The Armies of the north were under their orders. Moreover, a retirement of that kind would have involved almost certainly the destruction of a fine Belgian Army of 20 divisions and abandonment of the whole of Belgium.
Therefore, when the force and scope of the German penetration was realized and when the new French Generalissimo, General [Maxime] Weygand. assumed command in place of General Gamelin, an effort was made by the French and British Armies in Belgium to keep holding the right hand of the Belgians and give their own right hand to the newly created French Army which was to advance across the Somme in great strength.
However, the German eruption swept like a sharp scythe south of Amiens to the rear of the Armies in the north-eight or nine, armored divisions, each with about 400 armored vehicles of different kinds divisible into small, self-contained units.
This force cut off all communications between us and the main French Army. It severed our communications for food and ammunition. It ran first through Amiens, afterward through Abbeville, and it sheared its way up the coast to Boulogne and Calais, almost to Dunkirk.
Almost to Dunkirk. Behind this armored and mechanized onslaught came a number of German divisions in lorries, and behind them, again, plodded comparatively slowly the dull, brute mass of the ordinary German Army and German people, always ready to be led to the trampling down in other lands of liberties and comforts they never have known in their own.
I said this armored scythe stroke almost reached Dunkirk-almost but not quite.
Boulogne and Calais were scenes of desperate fighting. The Guards defended Boulogne for a while and were then withdrawn by orders from this country.
The rifle brigade of the Sixtieth Rifles [Queen Victoria's Rifles], with a battalion of British tanks and 1,000 Frenchmen, in all about 4,000 strong, defended Calais to the last. The British brigadier was given an hour to surrender. He spurned the offer. Four days of intense street fighting passed before the silence reigned in Calais which marked the end of a memorable resistance.