Lesson 8 Resources

Source A

The great air battle which has been in progress over this Island for the last few weeks has recently
attained a high intensity… It is quite plain that Herr Hitler could not admit defeat in his air attack on
Great Britain without sustaining most serious injury…. We may be sure, therefore, that he will continue
as long as he has the strength to do so…

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in
the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their
constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by
their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few…

Speech delivered by Winston Churchill, 20th August 1940.

Source B

The PM is very difficult these days, not that he has not always been. One has, however, to take a broad
view, because one has to deal with a man who is proving to be a magnificent leader; and one just has to
put up with his childishness, as long as it isn’t vital or dangerous.

Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord, in a letter to Admiral Cunningham, 1st December 1940.

Source C

.. And the wonderful thing is that 3/4 of the population of the world imagine that Churchill is one of the
Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other 1/4 have no idea what a public menace he is
and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect
the feet of clay of this otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with
him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again ... Never have I admired and despised a
man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the
same human being.

Field Marshal Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, writing in his diary, 10th September 1944.

Source D

The PM has a cold and so saw the King of Yugoslavia in bed.

About midnight… Antony Eden [the foreign secretary] rang up in a storm of rage.

It was about a memo that Lord Cherwell had sent which the PM had forwarded to the Foreign Office. In
it Eden’s view that Europe was on the brink of starvation had been contradicted. He ranted in a way
which neither I nor the PM had heard before. The PM handled the storm in a very adept and paternal
way, protesting at Antony vexing himself at the end of a long and tiring day. He said there was one thing
he would not allow; the feeding of Europe at the expense of an already hard-rationed England.

Winston Churchill’s private secretary, Sir John Colville, writing in his diary, 9th January 1945, later
published, 1987