“We shall fight on the beaches”

At 3.40 p.m. on 4 June 1940 the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, rose in the House of Commons to deliver the statement on the war situation he had promised a week earlier. That morning the evacuation of the Allied armies from Dunkirk had come to an end. Churchill spoke for about 35 minutes. Most of the speech was a sober, at times bitter, report on the defeat in Flanders, but its final sentences became one of the most famous texts of the 20th century: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” The speech was not broadcast, and contrary to what many Britons later remembered, nobody in 1940 heard it in Churchill’s own voice.

A week earlier

When Churchill informed the House of the capitulation of the Belgian army on 28 May, nobody in London knew how many troops could be taken off the coast. The Prime Minister asked members to prepare themselves for “hard and heavy tidings”, and named 4 June as the day for a full statement. That same evening, after three days of argument with Lord Halifax, he persuaded the government that Britain would not sound out peace terms through Italy (the War Cabinet crisis). Now he had to announce that decision to the country without revealing that it had ever been considered.

The situation was paradoxical. Operation Dynamo had saved far more men than anyone had expected: in nine days more than 330,000 British and French troops had been carried to England. But the army had lost almost all its equipment, Belgium was out of the war, and on the Somme and the Aisne General Maxime Weygand’s French forces were awaiting the next German blow, which came the very next day. The British government knew that the French front might not hold. On 3 and 4 June the War Cabinet discussed French requests for more fighter squadrons and, on the advice of the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, and the RAF command, decided to send no more, because the fighters had to be kept for the defence of the British Isles.

The mood in the country was poor. Observers from Mass-Observation, an organisation that had been studying public opinion since 1937, recorded depression in many places, and according to their reports only about half of those questioned were convinced that Britain would fight on. Relief at the soldiers’ return was mixed with fear of invasion, of parachutists and of a “fifth column”. Churchill therefore had to describe the disaster without embellishment, prepare people for the possible fall of France without giving the French any pretext for leaving the war, and convince both the British and the Americans that the country would not give in.

A report on defeat

Churchill wrote his great speeches himself, dictating them to secretaries and revising them many times. The text he spoke from was broken into short lines, laid out almost like verse, which helped him with his breathing and his emphasis. He began with the course of the campaign: from the breaking of the French defences on the Meuse at Sedan, through the “German eruption” that swept “like a sharp scythe” around the right flank and rear of the northern armies, to the march of the armoured divisions along the coast towards Boulogne-sur-Mer and Calais. Behind the tanks, he said, plodded slowly the dull, mindless mass of the ordinary German army and the German people, always so ready to let themselves be led into trampling down, in other countries, freedoms and comforts they had never known at home.

He spoke at length about the defence of Calais, where some 4,000 British and French soldiers had fought in the streets for four days. In his view their sacrifice had tied down at least two armoured divisions and allowed the French to flood and hold the water line at Gravelines, which kept the port of Dunkirk open. Historians still argue about how much difference that defence really made, but Churchill needed it as proof that the sacrifice had not been in vain.

He then admitted what he had feared a week earlier. When he had asked the House a week before to set aside that afternoon for a statement, he said, he had feared that it would be his hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in Britain’s long history. He had expected that 20,000–30,000 men might be embarked, while the rest of the army would be destroyed in the field or led into “an ignominious and starving captivity”, and with it “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army”.

He dealt harshly with the King of the Belgians, Leopold III, though without using the word “treachery” outright. He accused him of having surrendered his army and exposed the Allies’ line of retreat “suddenly, without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his Ministers and upon his own personal act”. He added that had Belgium not clung to a “fatal neutrality”, the French and British might at the start of the war have saved not only Belgium but perhaps even Poland. Most historians today judge the King’s conduct more leniently, but in June 1940 the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, and the Belgian government in exile spoke in similar terms.

“A miracle of deliverance”

The most important passage in the middle part of the speech concerned the evacuation. Churchill described 220 light warships and 650 other vessels under incessant bombardment, hospital ships targeted by German airmen, and sailors plying day and night through mined waters. He said:

Suddenly the scene had cleared; the crash and thunder had fallen silent for a moment – but only for a moment. A miracle of deliverance, won through courage, endurance, perfect discipline, flawless service, resourcefulness, skill and unshakeable loyalty, was plain for all of us to see. […] Using nearly a thousand vessels of every kind, the Navy had carried more than 335,000 men, French and British, out of the jaws of death and disgrace and back to their native land. We must take great care not to ascribe to this rescue the qualities of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.

The figure of 335,000 reflected what was known on 4 June. The final British returns give 338,226 men for Operation Dynamo.

Churchill added that “there was a victory inside this deliverance”, won by the RAF. The soldiers on the beaches had mostly seen the German bombers that got through the fighter screen, and many of them came home with grievances against the air force. The Prime Minister deliberately came to its defence: according to him, the Hurricanes, Spitfires and new Defiants had inflicted losses on the enemy of at least four to one. We now know this was a considerable exaggeration and that the two sides’ losses over Dunkirk were similar. Yet Churchill drew from it a conclusion that was to be borne out a few months later: if the RAF could hold its own over the French coast, it would have an even greater advantage over its own island. He compared the young airmen to the Knights of the Round Table and the Crusaders, quoting lines by Alfred Tennyson about the days when “every morning brought a noble chance, and every chance brought out a noble knight”.

“A colossal military disaster”

He then returned to the balance sheet. The army’s losses in men exceeded 30,000 killed, wounded and missing. The losses in equipment were “enormous”: nearly a thousand guns, all the transport and all the armoured vehicles of the army in the north. The Prime Minister did not mince his words:

Our gratitude for the rescue of the army and of so many men, whose loved ones have lived through a terrible week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster. The French army has been weakened, the Belgian army is lost, a large part of the fortified lines in which so much faith was placed has gone, many valuable mining districts and factories have passed into the enemy’s hands, all the Channel ports are his, with all the tragic consequences that follow, and we must expect another blow to fall almost at once, either on us or on France.

He said openly that Hitler was reported to have a plan for invading the British Isles, and recalled Napoleon, who had waited at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats. He announced that the British Expeditionary Force would be rebuilt under the command of Lord Gort and would return to France, and that the House would discuss the details of home defence in a secret session. He also defended stern measures against enemy aliens and suspect foreigners, as well as against British subjects who might become a danger, including the internment of the leaders of the British fascists. He acknowledged that many of those interned were passionate enemies of Nazism, but said that in the present strain not every distinction could be made. For the “fifth column” he promised a firm hand.

“We shall never surrender”

The final paragraphs, addressed no longer just to members of the House, ran as follows:

I myself am fully confident that if everyone does their duty, if nothing is neglected and if the best preparations are made, as they are being made, we shall prove once again that we can defend our island home, ride out the storm of war and outlast the threat of tyranny – if necessary for years, if necessary alone. That, at any rate, is what we shall try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government, of every one of its members. That is the will of Parliament and of the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, bound together in a common cause and a common need, will defend their native soil to the death, standing by one another like good comrades with all their strength.

Even though great 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, we shall not weaken or fail. We shall hold out to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if – which I do not for a moment believe – this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.

The words “if necessary alone” were a cautious but unmistakable preparation of the country for the fall of France, even though in the same sentence Churchill affirmed that the two allies would fight on together. It is often pointed out that in the sentence running from “We shall fight on the beaches” to “surrender”, every word except the last, “surrender”, derives from Old English. The only word of French origin is the one that means capitulation. Some have also sought the inspiration for this passage in Ferdinand Foch’s words of March 1918, that he would fight in front of Amiens, in Amiens and behind Amiens, and in Georges Clemenceau’s declaration of June 1918 that even if Paris were lost France would fight on the Loire, on the Garonne, in the Pyrenees, and in the end at sea and in Africa. Churchill knew both statements.

Words for America

The last sentence of the speech was aimed across the Atlantic. For an American listener it carried two messages. The first was that Britain would not capitulate, so aid to her would not be wasted. The second was implicit: even if the island fell, the fleet would pass to the Empire, not into German hands. Churchill was aware that this second idea could cut both ways. The next day, 5 June, he wrote to the Canadian Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, that care must be taken lest the Americans look too complacently on the prospect of a British collapse, after which they would take over the British fleet and the guardianship of the Empire without Britain. Since mid-May he had been asking President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for destroyers, aircraft and arms (his first appeal of 15 May). The speech of 4 June, reprinted in the American press, was part of the same campaign: America was to believe that Britain was worth supporting, and to understand that her fall would be a threat to the United States itself.

The reception

The House received the speech with deep emotion. One of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries, John Colville, noted in his diary: “A magnificent speech which obviously stirred the House.” The Conservative MP Henry “Chips” Channon, who was no admirer of Churchill, wrote that the Prime Minister had been eloquent and had spoken magnificent English, and that several Labour members had wept. The Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood, a friend of Churchill’s since the days of the Dardanelles operation, sent him a note: “My dear Winston. That was worth 1,000 guns and the speeches of 1,000 years.”

There was no debate after the speech. When the acting Leader of the Opposition, Hastings Lees-Smith, wished to add a few words, James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party protested, and Frederick Bellenger, an MP just back from France, asserted the right of ordinary members to express their views. The Speaker cut the dispute short. Churchill announced only that a secret session would be held the following Tuesday.

An anecdote found its way into Churchill’s biographies: as he sat down after the speech, he is said to have muttered to a colleague that they would fight them with broken beer bottles, because, damn it, that was all they had left. There is no reliable contemporary confirmation of it, but it captures well what the Prime Minister knew about the state of the island’s defences once the army had come back from France without its guns and vehicles.

In the country the response was more complex. The historian Richard Toye, who studied the Mass-Observation reports and the government’s morale reports, showed that some listeners found the speech depressing: the promise to fight “if necessary alone” was taken as a sign that France would fall. Others were relieved that the government was telling the truth. The unqualified enthusiasm with which the speech is remembered is largely the work of later memory.

A newsreader instead of the Prime Minister

Churchill’s speeches in the House of Commons were neither recorded nor broadcast in 1940, because Parliament would not allow microphones in the chamber. As on 13 May, on the evening of 4 June long extracts from the speech were read out by an announcer on the BBC evening news. Even in that form they made an impression. The writer Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson, an MP and Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Information, that even in the announcer’s mouth the Prime Minister’s words had sent shivers down her spine, “not of fear”, because one felt the whole strength and determination behind them, “like a great fortress”.

Churchill recorded the speech only in 1949, at his country house, Chartwell, for a gramophone edition of his war speeches that was later issued by Decca. It is this recording that is heard today in documentaries and feature films, and even at Iron Maiden concerts. Because it is so ubiquitous, many Britons after the war were sincerely convinced that they had heard Churchill’s voice on the radio in June 1940.

The same misunderstanding lies behind the myth of a stand-in. The radio actor Norman Shelley, known among other things as the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh in BBC children’s programmes, claimed in the late 1970s that at the authorities’ request he had recorded Churchill’s speeches, including “fighting on the beaches”, for broadcast abroad. The British writer David Irving repeated the claim in 1987, and in 2000 a disc was found among Shelley’s possessions labelled “BBC, Churchill: speech. Performer Norman Shelley”, dated 7 September 1942. The press took this as proof that the nation had been listening to an actor. Researchers, including archivists of the Churchill Archives Centre and the International Churchill Society, pointed out, however, that the disc was made more than two years after June 1940 and concerns a different text, connected with the events of 1942, and that there is no evidence it was ever broadcast. Nor could an actor have “dubbed” the speech of 4 June in 1940, since at that time nobody broadcast it in the Prime Minister’s voice. Also false is a widely circulated quotation, supposedly from a radio broadcast by Chamberlain, about fighting “on the beaches” and “in every house”, from which Churchill is supposed to have taken his words: its source, a 1946 biography of Chamberlain, dates it to the end of June 1940, that is, after Churchill’s speech.

Its place in the war

The speech of 4 June was the second of Churchill’s three great addresses during the French campaign, after the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech of 13 May. The next day the Germans attacked on the Somme, and within three weeks they had defeated France. On 18 June, when the new French government had asked for an armistice, Churchill reminded the House that two weeks earlier he had warned of the possibility of fighting “if necessary alone”, and called on his countrymen so to bear themselves that, a thousand years on, people would still say: “This was their finest hour.” He repeated that speech himself on the radio that evening.

The promise to fight on the beaches was never put to the test. In the summer of 1940 the Germans prepared a plan for invasion (Operation Sea Lion), but its precondition was command of the skies over the Channel, and that the Luftwaffe failed to achieve in the Battle of Britain, won by the airmen whom Churchill had compared to knights on 4 June. The sentence about the New World came true as well: in September 1940 the United States transferred 50 old destroyers to Britain, in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, and in December 1941 America itself was at war.

The speech became Churchill’s best-known text. In 1954 the American journalist Edward R. Murrow, who in 1940 had reported the war from London for American listeners, said that Churchill had “mobilised the English language and sent it into battle”. President John F. Kennedy repeated those words when he conferred honorary citizenship of the United States on Churchill in 1963. In collective memory the speech of 4 June 1940 became the symbol of the moment when Britain, after the defeat of its army on the Continent, resolved to fight on.