“The end of the beginning”

On 10 November 1942 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, delivered one of the most frequently quoted speeches of the war at the Mansion House in London, the residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London. For the first time since 1939 he could speak of a great victory for British arms on land. He summed it up in words that passed into history: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” The same speech also contained his declaration that he had not become Prime Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. That same day the knighthood and promotion of the victor of El Alamein, Bernard Montgomery, were announced, and five days later, on Sunday 15 November, church bells rang out across Britain for the first time since 1940.

A year of defeats

Churchill was speaking after the worst year of his premiership. Since December 1941 the British had suffered almost nothing but defeats: they had lost Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore and Burma; in February 1942 German battleships had passed through the English Channel under their noses; and on 21 June in North Africa Tobruk had fallen with a garrison of more than thirty thousand men. The news of Tobruk’s surrender reached Churchill at the White House, while he was talking with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and was, as he recalled, one of the heaviest blows of the war. At the beginning of July the Prime Minister had to defend himself in the House of Commons against a motion of no confidence. He won decisively, but criticism of the conduct of the war did not die down, and his position depended on whether the army would at last win a victory.

In August Churchill changed the command in the Middle East. General Harold Alexander became Commander-in-Chief, and Lieutenant General Montgomery took command of the Eighth Army. On 23 October Montgomery opened the Second Battle of El Alamein. After ten days of gruelling fighting and Operation Supercharge the Axis front broke, and on 4 November Erwin Rommel, against Hitler’s orders, began retreating westwards, leaving most of the Italian infantry behind in the desert. On 8 November American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. As Churchill rose from the table at the Mansion House, the Eighth Army was pursuing the remnants of Rommel’s Panzer Army towards the Libyan frontier, and in Algiers Admiral François Darlan was negotiating with the Americans an end to the fighting by the Vichy French forces.

The Mansion House speech

The occasion was the traditional November luncheon given by the new Lord Mayor, who since 9 November had been Samuel Joseph. In peacetime the Prime Minister delivered an annual address on the international situation at such a banquet in the Guildhall; in wartime, with the Guildhall in ruins after the raid of December 1940, the event was held at the Mansion House. The next day the British and American press reprinted long extracts from the speech.

Churchill began light-heartedly by remarking that the Lord Mayor, in his own speech, had concluded that the news from the fronts had been “a little better lately”. Then he came to the point: “We have victory – a remarkable and definite victory.” Its glow, he said, had fallen on the helmets of the soldiers and warmed and cheered all hearts. General Alexander, with his brilliant comrade and lieutenant General Montgomery, had won a splendid and decisive victory in what, Churchill thought, should be called “the Battle of Egypt”. Rommel’s army, he went on, had been defeated, routed, and very largely destroyed as a fighting force.

Immediately afterwards he warned against euphoria. From now on, he said, the Germans would be fighting troops as well armed as themselves, perhaps better, and in many theatres they would meet the superiority in the air that they had so often used without mercy against others. After this caveat came the famous words: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” In texts of the speech the second sentence is sometimes given in two slightly different versions (“the beginning of the end” and “the beginning to the end”), but its meaning is the same.

Churchill devoted a large part of the speech to Operation Torch. He stressed that its author was the President of the United States as Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces, and that he himself had been his “active and ardent lieutenant” in the enterprise. In this way he sought to make it easier for the French in Africa to come over to the Allies: Vichy hated the Americans far less than the British, who in 1940 had opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. He also spoke about France. He declared his conviction that “France will rise again”, and added that as long as there were men like General Charles de Gaulle and those who followed him, and men like General Henri Giraud, “that gallant warrior whom no prison can hold”, his faith in the future of France was unshakeable. Naming the two generals side by side was significant: the Americans were then backing Giraud and had kept de Gaulle out of the preparations for the invasion.

“I have not become the King’s First Minister”

The sharpest passage of the speech concerned the future of the British Empire. Churchill repeated that Britain was not waging this war for territorial gain or commercial advantage. But he immediately added that, so that there should be no misunderstanding about it anywhere, Britain meant to hold on to what was hers: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” If such a task were ever set, he added, someone else would have to be found for it. According to the typescript kept in the Churchill Archive, the Prime Minister added this passage by hand on the last page of the text.

The words were addressed above all to the Americans. In the autumn of 1942 people in the United States were asking ever more loudly whether American soldiers were to die to maintain British rule in India and Asia. In August the British authorities had arrested Gandhi and the Congress leaders after the “Quit India” resolution, and India was in turmoil. The American press recalled that the Atlantic Charter of 1941 had promised peoples the right to choose their own government; Churchill had already stated in the House of Commons that this principle did not apply to British possessions. He was particularly irritated by the statements of Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate of 1940, who, on a journey round the world as Roosevelt’s personal envoy, had criticised colonialism in China and, after his return, in a widely noted radio broadcast on 26 October, had demanded that the Allies make clear commitments to the colonial peoples. The Mansion House speech was a reply to these voices, delivered at a moment when the British army’s victory allowed the Prime Minister to speak from a position of strength.

Sir Bernard Montgomery

A supplement to the official London Gazette dated 10 November 1942 announced that Montgomery was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) and at the same time promoted to general, the highest general officer’s rank below field marshal. Both honours took effect from 11 November, which is why both dates appear in the sources: 10 November as the date of the announcement and 11 November as the date of the award. As recently as mid-October Montgomery had been confirmed in the substantive rank of lieutenant general, and now, after less than three months in command of the Eighth Army, he began to be styled “Sir Bernard”.

The promotion was a reward for the Empire’s first great land battle won in this war, and at the same time part of the policy of Churchill, who needed a victorious general as a symbol. Montgomery, ambitious and hungry for publicity, was perfectly suited to the role. His name, known only within the army as late as that summer, became one of the most popular in Britain within a few weeks. Some historians point out that even then, in the first days of the pursuit, he was criticised for a caution that allowed the remnants of Rommel’s army to slip out of Egypt; the rains of 6 and 7 November near Mersa Matruh slowed the pursuit still further.

The bells of 15 November

Since June 1940 the church bells of Britain had been silent. The government had reserved them as an alarm signal: their ringing was to mean that the German invasion had begun and paratroops were landing. After the victory in Egypt Churchill decided to celebrate it with the bells. On Sunday 15 November 1942 they rang out in cathedrals, abbeys and village churches across the country, from St Paul’s Cathedral in London to the churches of Scotland. The BBC broadcast the ringing, relayed among other places from St Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh, at home and abroad. Many Britons later remembered that Sunday as the first moment in the war when they believed in victory.

The decision was not taken at once. In the Prime Minister’s circle there were fears that the celebration would prove premature if Rommel managed to make a stand or the landings in North Africa failed, and the bells were held back for several days after the front had been broken. By the time they rang, the Eighth Army had retaken Tobruk and the French forces in Morocco and Algeria had stopped fighting. The ban on ringing bells for ordinary church purposes was relaxed for Christmas 1942 and lifted in 1943, when the threat of invasion had passed.

Place in the war

Churchill’s cautious formula proved apt. In November 1942 the war really did change direction, and not only in Africa. Nine days after the speech the Red Army launched a counter-offensive at Stalingrad that encircled the German 6th Army, and in the Pacific in mid-November the Americans beat off the last great Japanese attempt to retake Guadalcanal. From then on the Axis powers were mostly on the defensive. “The end of the beginning” did not, however, mean a swift end: the fighting in Tunisia went on until May 1943, and Germany’s surrender was still two and a half years away.

In British memory El Alamein became the dividing line between two eras of the war. Years later Churchill put it in his memoirs in the words that before Alamein they had not had a single victory, and after Alamein they did not suffer a single defeat. It was a simplification, since defeats still occurred, but it captured the mood of November 1942. The victory also strengthened the Prime Minister’s position at home: after a year of criticism no one any longer seriously questioned his leadership.

The pledge to defend the Empire fared less well. Churchill kept his word in the sense that as Prime Minister, until 1945, he agreed to no concessions on Indian independence. The liquidation of the Empire, however, was carried out by the “someone else” of whom the Prime Minister had spoken at the Mansion House: the government of Clement Attlee, which in 1947 granted independence to India and Pakistan. The speech of 10 November 1942 was thus remembered for two reasons – as a herald of victory and as the last great declaration of faith in the British Empire in its old form.