Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [14]
When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons of that moral aspect. He was still a back-bencher, awaiting the call—which came after the debate—to join Chamberlain’s government. Three days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland and seized the Free City of Danzig. “This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland,” Churchill told the House of Commons. “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain: no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”
This speech, reproduced in all the newspapers on the following morning, was a clarion call to those who would have to give up many home comforts to help the war effort and to risk—and sometimes lose—their lives in the battles and aerial bombardments that lay ahead. The speech marked Churchill out as a person—perhaps the only one in government or on its fringes—who saw and clearly expressed the true meaning of Britain’s participation in the war. After entering the War Cabinet later that day, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill returned to this theme on 1 October 1939, in his first wartime broadcast, telling his listeners, “We are the defenders of civilization and freedom.” In his second broadcast, on 12 November 1939, he recognized the nature of the adversary and spoke with both defiance and hope. “The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism,” he declared. “Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe. Even in Germany itself there are millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine. Let them take courage amid perplexities and perils, for it may well be that the final extinction of a baleful domination will pave the way to a broader solidarity of all the men in all the lands than we could ever have planned if we had not marched together through the fire.”
Churchill’s clear understanding of the issues at stake enhanced his leadership of the nation even before he became Prime Minister. That vision was conveyed both in speeches and broadcasts to the British public and in secret to his closest colleagues in government. On 18 December 1939, he told the War Cabinet: “We are fighting to establish the reign of law and to protect the liberties of small countries. Our defeat would mean an age of barbaric violence, and would be fatal not only to ourselves, but to the independent life of every small country in Europe.” He added that making war might well involve breaches of the rule of law: the issue under discussion was Churchill’s request for the violation by British warships of Norwegian territorial waters, to prevent the passage of Swedish iron ore to Germany along the Norwegian coast. But even if such action were to be authorized, Churchill explained that nothing would be done by Britain that would be accompanied by “inhumanity of any kind.”
As Prime Minister, Churchill reiterated in his public pronouncements his understanding of the moral nature of the conflict. In his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech of 4 June 1940, he spoke of how “large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule.” It was that “odious apparatus” against which he fought, and which the British people understood to be the enemy. It was not “Germany” or the German people, but a perversion of all that was decent, humane, modern and constructive in human society. In May 1941, in a message to the American Booksellers Association, he warned that when the minds of nations could be “cowed by the will of one