The King's Speech - Mark Logue [85]
They ran through the text; it went well: the speech ran to five and a half minutes, and they needed to make just two alterations. The only problem was the loud ticking of a clock, coming from the King’s bedroom, which had to be silenced for fear of it spoiling the broadcast.
After they had finished, they returned to the King’s room – and he went immediately back to the windows to see what had become of the bees. The people had all gone, leaving behind a small box. As Logue was sitting making small changes to the speech, the Queen came in, and to his amusement, the King ‘explained like a schoolboy, what had happened about the bees, even going down on his knees to explain the detail of the capture’. The Queen also became excited, and said, ‘Oh Bertie, I wish I had been here.’
That evening, as Britons gathered around their radios, the King spoke:
Four years ago our nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy with our backs to the wall, tested as never before in our history, and we survived that test. The spirit of the people, resolute and dedicated, burned like a bright flame, surely, from those unseen fires which nothing can quench.
Once more the supreme test has to be faced. This time the challenge is not to fight to survive, but to fight to win the final victory for the good cause. Once again, what is demanded from us all is something more than courage, more than endurance.
The King went on to call for a ‘revival of the spirit, a new unconquerable reserve’ and to ‘renew that crusading impulse on which we entered the war and met its darkest hour’. He concluded with a quote from verse 11 of Psalm 29: ‘The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace.’
The speech perfectly fitted the national mood. While the front pages of the newspapers the following morning carried graphic accounts of the landings, the leader writers reacted with pride at what was seen as a chance for Britain finally to reverse the indignity it had suffered four years earlier at Dunkirk. The King received a number of letters of gratitude that touched him deeply – none more than the one sent by his mother, Queen Mary. ‘I am glad you liked my broadcast,’ he wrote in reply. ‘It was a great opportunity to call everybody to prayer. I have wanted to do it for a long time.’88
Operation Overlord proved a success. The battle for Normandy continued for more than two months. On 21 August, after a battle that raged for more than a week, the so-called ‘Falaise Pocket’ was closed, trapping 50,000 German troops inside. Days later, Paris was liberated – the German garrison occupying the city surrendered on 25 August – and by the thirtieth the last German troops had retreated across the River Seine. Brussels was liberated by British forces on 3 September. By October, German forces had been almost completely driven from France and Belgium and from the southern portion of the Netherlands.
The Allies were also moving forward in Italy, with their aim the capture of Rome. During the early morning hours of 22 January 1944, troops of the Fifth Army had swarmed ashore on a fifteen-mile stretch of Italian beach near the pre-war resort towns of Anzio and Nettuno, taking the Germans almost completely by surprise. The initial landings were carried out so flawlessly and the resistance so light that British and American units had gained their first day’s objectives by noon, and moved three to four miles inland by nightfall. The British forces included the Scots Guards, among whom was Second Lieutenant Antony Logue – Lionel’s youngest.
In a classic military blunder, however, Major General John Lucas, the commander of the US VI Corps, then threw away any element of surprise by delaying his advance in order to consolidate his beachhead. When he did try and move forward at the end of the month, he faced fierce resistance from the Germans under General Albert Kesselring, who in the meantime