“Never was so much owed by so many to so few”

At 3.52 p.m. on 20 August 1940 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, rose in the House of Commons to give a statement on the war situation. He spoke for almost fifty minutes, until 4.40 p.m. The speech was a broad survey of the first year of the war: it compared it with 1914, announced a strict blockade of the Continent, explained the withdrawal from British Somaliland and declared Britain’s readiness to lease bases in the western hemisphere to the United States. Above all, however, it is remembered for one sentence about the airmen who had been fighting over England for several weeks: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Ever since that day the airmen of the Battle of Britain have been known in Britain as “the Few”.

Four days earlier at Uxbridge

The sentence was born on 16 August. That day Churchill drove to the headquarters of the RAF’s No. 11 Group at Uxbridge, on the western outskirts of London. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park’s group defended south-eastern England and the capital, and so it bore the brunt of the German attacks. From the gallery of the underground operations room the Prime Minister watched the markers of German formations being moved across the great map table, while on the board on the wall the lights of the squadrons ready for take-off went out one after another. It was one of the hardest days of the battle, the day after “Black Thursday”, when the Luftwaffe had attacked airfields in Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. At one point every squadron of the group was in the air, and further waves were approaching the coast.

The Prime Minister was accompanied by General Hastings Ismay, his chief of staff in his capacity as Minister of Defence. According to Ismay’s memoirs, when they got into the car that evening to drive to Chequers, Churchill said: “Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.” After several minutes of silence he leaned forward and said that never in the field of human conflict had so much been owed by so many to so few. Four days later the House of Commons heard the words.

A year of a new kind of war

20 August brought a temporary lull in the Battle of Britain. After the Hardest Day, 18 August, the weather had worsened, and for several days the Germans confined themselves to smaller raids. Churchill used the moment to take a wider view. He began by observing that almost a year had passed since the war broke out, and that it was natural, he thought, to stop at this milestone on the road and take in the whole dark, wide field.

He devoted the first part to a comparison with the First World War. That war had been a slaughter: “Men and shells!” had been the cry, and millions of soldiers had hurled “enormous masses of steel” at one another. The new war, in his view, was a conflict of strategy, organisation, technical apparatus, science, mechanics and morale. In the first twelve months of the Great War the British had lost 365,000 killed, wounded, captured and missing; in the first year of the present war, civilians included, no more than 92,000, a large proportion of them prisoners. The results, however, had been more devastating than a quarter of a century earlier: great states with powerful armies had ceased to exist within a few weeks, and France had succumbed with losses smaller than in any one of several great battles of 1914–1918.

Another change was that whole nations were now fighting. The front, said Churchill, ran everywhere; trenches were being dug in towns and streets, every village was fortified, every road barred, the front line ran through the factories, and the workers were soldiers with different weapons but the same courage. He argued that such a war suited the British, who had been brought up not in totalitarian uniformity but in tolerance and variety, and he added a remark that sounds especially striking with hindsight: since the Germans had driven out the Jews and lowered their technical standards, British science was well ahead of theirs. He announced preparations for the campaigns of 1941 and 1942 and added that two or three years were not long in the history of a nation that had the honour of being the sole champion of the freedom of all Europe.

Blockade and hunger

The most politically difficult passage was the announcement that Britain would maintain a strict blockade (PL) not only of Germany but also of Italy, France and every country that had fallen under German rule. Three days earlier Berlin had proclaimed a total blockade of the British Isles. Churchill remarked drily that he had read in the newspapers that Herr Hitler, too, had declared a strict blockade of the British Isles; no one could complain of that, and he recalled that the Kaiser had done the same in the previous war.

He rejected appeals to let food through the blockade for the people of the occupied countries. Such schemes, among them a plan of relief for France, Belgium and the Netherlands promoted by the former President of the United States Herbert Hoover, sprang, in the Prime Minister’s words, from the noblest of motives, but the food would either be plundered by the occupiers or relieve Germany of the duty of feeding the conquered nations. He pointed out that Norway had had a year’s supplies when she was invaded, and that Poland, though not a rich country, usually produced enough food for her people. If that food ran short, it was because it had been carried off to the Reich. Fats were being used to make explosives, potatoes to distil fuel alcohol, and milk to make the plastics used in aircraft. He promised, on the other hand, that food would be sent at once to any part of Europe that was wholly freed from the Germans, including – he said this deliberately – the German and Austrian peoples. This pledge became one of the seeds of the post-war relief programmes.

“A cataract of disaster”

A little over a hundred days had passed since the new government was formed. Churchill listed what had happened in that time: the Dutch overrun, their Queen in exile, Rotterdam the scene of a massacre as hideous as anything in the Thirty Years’ War, Belgium invaded, the British army cut off and saved as if by a miracle, France knocked out of the war, Italy on the enemy’s side, a “puppet government” at Vichy, and the whole coast from the North Cape to the Spanish frontier in German hands. Had anyone at the beginning of May put such a prospect before them, he said, it would have seemed incredible that through this period of horror and disaster they would stand erect, confident and masters of their own fate.

He explained the grounds for that confidence. The army, equipped in July with supplies from across the ocean, numbered more than two million men with rifles, three-quarters of them in regular formations. The fleet was stronger than at the beginning of the war, though the Prime Minister expressed the hope that friends across the ocean would help to bridge the period until new ships entered service. Merchant tonnage under the British flag was greater after a year of submarine warfare than at its start. He also repeated the words of his speech of 4 June: that the country could fight on “if necessary for years, if necessary alone”.

The Few

Then he turned to the air battle, which in recent weeks had reached a great intensity. He predicted that Hitler could not break it off without a heavy loss of prestige, and noted that he would keep it up for as long as his strength and his worries about the Russian air force allowed. The conditions of the fighting favoured the British, however: German aircraft shot down over the island were lost together with their crews, whereas many British pilots and some of their machines returned to the fight. The Prime Minister praised the system for recovering and repairing aircraft, and the rise in output that the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, had achieved with an organising talent and drive that seemed like magic. According to Churchill, British production now exceeded German, and the number of bombers and fighters with the squadrons was larger, after all the fighting, than ever before. British claims of German losses were greatly inflated at the time, but in the overall picture the Prime Minister was right: the Luftwaffe was not achieving the success it expected, and Fighter Command, though exhausted, was still able to fight.

Then came the words he had prepared in the car after the visit to Uxbridge:

The gratitude of every home on our island, in our empire and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, heedless of the enemy’s superiority and tireless in the face of unceasing challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their valour and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Few people remember that Churchill at once widened the circle of those to whom gratitude was due. All hearts, he said, went out to the fighter pilots whose brilliant deeds they saw with their own eyes day after day, but it must never be forgotten that all the while, night after night and month after month, the bomber squadrons were flying deep into Germany. He praised the crews of Bomber Command, who since May had been bombing the Ruhr and other targets in the Reich, and predicted that within a year the bombing of German war industry might reach a scale hitherto unimaginable and was one of the surest roads to victory. Collective memory has erased this part of the speech, and the phrase “the Few” attached itself to the fighter pilots. Among the airmen a joke went round that the Prime Minister had meant their mess bills, since that was the “so much” owed by “so few”.

The Mediterranean and France

Churchill went on to turn to Italy, which, without the slightest provocation, in cold blood and out of greed, had stabbed France in the back and was now marching against the British in Africa. He admitted that France’s fall from the war had done Britain great harm in the Middle East. The defence of British Somaliland had relied on French troops from Djibouti. Since it had been decided before the war not to defend the protectorate, and the small British force had been attacked by “nearly two divisions” of Italians, it had been right to withdraw it “virtually intact”. The evacuation had ended only the day before, when the Italians took Berbera. The words about troops withdrawn “intact” were a deft presentation of the first British defeat in Africa.

To France he devoted words full of regret. The Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians were still fighting, recognised by Britain and the United States as the lawful governments of their countries. The fall of France, in his view, was the fault not of a great and noble nation but of “the men of Vichy”. General Charles de Gaulle and his companions had been sentenced to death by Vichy, but the day would come, as surely as the sun would rise tomorrow, when their names would be honoured and carved in stone in the streets and villages of a France restored to full freedom and to her ancient glory.

He declined, on the other hand, to set out in detail the aims of the war and the shape of the post-war peace, as many correspondents had asked him to do. It was enough for him to state that Britain had recognised the government of Edvard Beneš and had assured de Gaulle that her victory would restore France’s freedom. They were still toiling up the hill, he said; they had not yet reached the crest.

“Let it roll”

The last part was addressed to the other side of the Atlantic. Churchill announced that the British government had decided, spontaneously, unasked and without any inducement, to make bases available to the United States for the naval and air defence of the western hemisphere, and that it was ready to lease them for 99 years, in agreement with Canada and Newfoundland, without any transfer of sovereignty. He referred to the statement by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of 16 August about talks on bases in Newfoundland and the West Indies. Of the other side of the bargain – the fifty American destroyers he had been seeking since May – he said not a word. This picture, a voluntary gesture for the common security rather than a trade of territory for warships, suited both governments: Roosevelt could present it to Congress and the voters as a gain for America, and Churchill did not have to admit that Britain was paying for help with pieces of the empire.

He closed with an image that was received with enthusiasm in America:

Undoubtedly this process means that these two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking to the future, I see nothing disturbing in this process. I could not stop it even if I wished to; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it simply goes on flowing. Let it flow. Let it flow on at full tide, relentlessly, irresistibly, beneficially, towards broader lands and better days.

Churchill’s biographers relate, following the diary of his secretary John Colville, that on the drive back from Parliament the Prime Minister sang “Ol’ Man River”, the song about the Mississippi, in the car.

Reception

The reply for the opposition came from its acting leader, the Labour MP Hastings Lees-Smith, who said that after such a speech the rest of the debate was bound to be an anticlimax and stressed that the Prime Minister had spoken for a united nation. He singled out two decisions as the most important: to maintain the blockade in full force and to make bases available to the Americans. The debate went on until 10 p.m. Members spoke about war aims, food relief for occupied Europe, radio propaganda and Abyssinia, and the only Communist MP, William Gallacher, attacked “anti-Soviet propaganda”, citing among other things the Polish émigré press. The debate was closed by the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair.

The speech was not broadcast. Like the Prime Minister’s other speeches in the House of Commons, it was known in the country from the press and from extracts read out in BBC news bulletins. Churchill did not repeat it at the microphone that evening, unlike his “finest hour” speech of 18 June. The well-known recording was made only after the war, when the Prime Minister recorded his war speeches for release on gramophone records. For this reason even the historian Richard Toye, in his book on Churchill’s speeches, initially assumed that the speech of 20 August had been broadcast, and later corrected himself.

Place in the war

The speech was delivered on the eve of the hardest phase of the Battle of Britain. From 24 August the Luftwaffe concentrated its attacks on No. 11 Group’s sector airfields, and for two weeks Fighter Command suffered losses it could not have sustained for long. From 7 September the Germans shifted the weight of their raids to London, giving the fighter force a breathing space, and on 15 September, when Churchill was again watching the fighting from the operations room at Uxbridge, the RAF repulsed two great daylight raids on the capital. Two days later Hitler postponed the invasion. By the day of the speech Polish pilots were already flying in British squadrons, and Polish fighter units were entering the fight: No. 303 Squadron fought its first action on 30 August and, according to the tallies of the time, soon became the most successful RAF fighter squadron in the battle.

The agreement with the Americans foreshadowed in the speech was signed on 2 September: the United States handed over 50 old destroyers in return for leases on the bases. It was the first step along the road that Churchill had described with the image of the Mississippi, leading through Lend-Lease in March 1941 and the Atlantic Charter in August 1941 to a common war from December 1941. The blockade of the Continent, which he had announced so firmly, remained a principle of British policy, with the important exception of Greece, to which grain shipments were allowed through from 1942 to stave off famine there.

The sentence about “the Few” became the shortest definition of the Battle of Britain. Fewer than 3,000 airmen from Britain, the Dominions and the countries of occupied Europe received the clasp for taking part in the battle, among them more than a hundred and forty Poles. Their names are listed on the monument by the Thames in London, and a book of remembrance of the fallen is kept in Westminster Abbey. In 1942 the film The First of the Few, with Leslie Howard as the designer of the Spitfire, alluded to the same sentence in its title. The words spoken on 16 August in the car near Uxbridge belong, together with “blood, toil, tears and sweat”, “we shall fight on the beaches” and “their finest hour”, to the four most famous phrases with which Churchill described the Britain of 1940.