Speaking to the nation on the second anniversary of his Prime Ministership, Winston Churchill said in effect that the turning point in World War II had arrived. He said it persuasively. Nothing bucks up a Prime Minister like victories, and Churchill had Madagascar, the terrific R.A.F. raids on Germany, and the Coral Sea to bolster his spirits.
The Prime Minister was in a plum-pudding mood. He joshed Adolf Hitler for a big mistake: "He forgot about the winter. There is a winter, you know, in Russia. For a good many months the temperature is apt to fall very low. There is snow, there is frost and all that. Hitler forgot about this Russian winter. He must have been very loosely educated. We all heard about it at school. But he forgot it."
But Winston Churchill soon got down to his famed rhetoric:
We are on his tracks, and so is the great republic of the United States. Already the Royal Air Force has set about it. The British and, presently, the American bombing offensive against Germany will be one of the principal features of this year's World War. . . .
"We are in a position to carry into Germany many many times the tonnage of high explosives which he can send here. And proportion will increase all the summer, all the autumn, and all the winter, all the spring, all the summer and so on."
Churchill warned Germany sharply against the use of poison gas (see p. 24), then touched adroitly on the question of a second front:
Meanwhile, our deliveries of tanks, aircraft and munitions to Russia from Britain and from the United States continue upon a full scale...Is there anything else we can do to take the weight off Russia? We are urged from many quarters to invade the continent of Europe and so form a second front. Naturally I shall not disclose what our intentions are, but there is one thing I will say. I welcome the militant aggressive spirit of the British nation, so strongly shared across the Atlantic Ocean. ... It is encouraging and inspiring to feel the strong heartbeats of a free nation, surging forward, stern and undaunted in a righteous cause."
The Prime Minister ended, as he had begun, in high humor: "Therefore, tonight, I give you a message of good cheer—you deserve it and the facts indorse it. But be it good cheer or be it bad cheer, it will make no difference to us. We shall drive on to the end, and do our duty, win or die. God helping us, we can do no other." Not many Britons realized that these final words were a graceful echo from Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war in 1917. President Wilson, speaking of the establishment of a universal dominion of right by free people, had said: "To such a task we can dedicate our lives and fortunes. . . . America . . . God helping her . . . can do no other."