“Speech on the Evacuation at Dunkirk”
“Speech on the Evacuation at Dunkirk”
by Winston Churchil
THE LITERARY WORK
A speech delivered to the British House of Commons in England on June 4, 1940.
SYNOPSIS
The British prime minister reports on a crucial event of World War II and bolsters the nation’s will to combat their German enemy.
Events in History at the Time of the Speech
Following Germany’s abrupt invasion of France in May 1940, British forces, who saw their French ally crumble before the German onslaught, fell back to the coast of northern France. Here they secured a small area around the seaside resort of Dunkirk and mounted a massive evacuation of not only their own troops but also some 110,000 French soldiers. On June 4, Prime Minister Winston Churchill recounted these events to the House of Commons, at the same time proclaiming in ringing oratory his and his nation’s unwavering opposition to the Nazi threat.
Events in History at the Time of the Speech
Churchill’s “wilderness years.”
Winston Churchill’s political career is one of the most extraordinary in British history. Raised in a family tradition of Victorian upper-class privilege and political leadership, he spent much of his childhood in unhappy rebellion, often doing poorly in the exclusive boarding schools to which his father sent him. After brief careers as a soldier and then journalist, Churchill was elected to Parliament in 1900. He went on to serve in the government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George during World War I and to hold several cabinet positions during the 1920s, notably, Lord of the Admiralty. Between 1929 and 1939, a period usually referred to as his “wilderness years,” Churchill held no office in government at all. He was often in public disagreement with the policies of the Conservative Party governments that held power in the 1930s, and his political career was generally considered to be over. As the 1930s wore on, the issue on which Churchill opposed the government most vigorously was its policy of “appeasement” toward Germany, and toward its increasingly hostile ruler, Adolf Hitler.
Hitler and German aggression
Having built the National Socialist (Nazi) Party during the 1920s, Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and immediately set about consolidating his position as ruler. In the first three years of his regime, he destroyed all political opposition to the Nazi Party and brought the German military under his own direct personal control. He also began a strenuous program of rearmament and military expansion; by the mid-1930s German factories had begun churning out airplanes, tanks, warships, and big guns in numbers that quickly put Germany among Europe’s best-armed nations. These were in direct conflict with provisions spelled out in the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I. In 1936 Hitler initiated military conscription in order to achieve a planned fivefold increase in the army’s manpower.
Although Hitler had a plan for the German army, he deployed troops before it was fully in place. In March 1936, against the advice of his senior generals, Hitler sent German troops to occupy the Rhineland, a heavily industrialized part of Germany bordering France that the Versailles Treaty had designated a demilitarized zone. The powerful French army—which, in the later words of one German general, “could have blown us to bits”—did nothing to oppose this move (Gelb, p. 29). Two years later, in March 1938, Hitler again tested his neighbors’ resolve by annexing Austria. Britain and France protested but took no firmer action. Later that year, Hitler cowed the French and British governments into accepting his demands that the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia populated by ethnic Germans, be ceded to Germany. Czechoslovakia was excluded from these negotiations, which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed had achieved “peace in our time” (Chamberlain in Carse, p. 4).
In March 1939, German troops invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia itself. Britain and France now felt compelled to guarantee the security of Czechoslovakia’s neighbor, Poland. The situation intensified when the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in August 1939, which meant that Germany might attack Poland with no fear of a Soviet response. Just over a week later, on September 1, Germany launched its blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” across Poland’s borders. Driven by their promises to defend Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3. The bloodiest conflict in world history had begun.
Maginot Line
For some months, however, Germany and the Allies faced each other in a tense but inactive standoff. Many jokingly called it the “sitzkrieg,” meaning the “sit-down war,” or simply, “the phony war.” Despite Germany’s vulnerability while her armies were engaged in Poland, the French, considered to possess the greatest army in the world, still did nothing. French leadership had staked everything on a defensive strategy based on weaponry and tactics that had served well in the trench warfare of World War I. French commanders, for example, belittled the idea that tanks and airplanes might ever play anything more than a supporting role in combat, as they had in the earlier war. Yet the blitzkrieg’s stunning success rested on these highly mobile and rapidly déployable weapons.
Instead the French relied on a series of massive fortifications along their border with Germany. Called the Maginot Line, after the French general who had conceived them, these strong, technologically sophisticated forts embodied the French leaders’ complete faith in defense to win any future wars. In the years following World War I, the Maginot Line provided France with a sense of security—a sense that would soon enough prove completely false. It rested on the assumption that any German attack would come along the French-German border, where the forts were placed. Further north, however, neutral Belgium lay between the two enemies. The French hesitated to fortify their border with Belgium, fearing perhaps that the Belgians might take such action as a hostile move. There was also some expectation that the Germans would respect Belgian neutrality, although they had invaded France through Belgium in World War I. In the end, the French relied on having secured their border with Germany and left their border with Belgium unfortified; in effect, they were putting burglar-proof locks on the doors while leaving the windows wide open.
Blitzkrieg in the West
In April 1940, Hitler opened his campaign for the conquest of western Europe with attacks on Denmark and Norway. Then, on May 10, German paratroopers began dropping into Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium, supported by the fighters and bombers of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In northern France, near the Belgian border, French and British troops moved west into northern Belgium to support the Belgians against the invading Germans.
But Hitler had one more dramatic surprise in store for the Allies. Instead of making his major thrust through the plains of northern Belgium, where the British and French troops were bracing to meet it, he was sending his main panzer (German tank) divisions through Luxembourg and southern Belgium. There the panzers—the tanks that had performed so well in Poland—would break into France through the Ardennes Forest. The French had long considered the Ardennes impenetrable and therefore guarded it with only their most poorly trained troops. On May 9, a column of panzers 100 miles long, escorted by fighters, bombers, and artillery, began rolling through the Ardennes. As they emerged from the dense forest, the surprised and poorly prepared French soldiers gave way. German
Stukas, dive-bombers equipped with sirens that gave off terrifying screams as the planes made their steep bombing runs, were especially effective in backing up the panzers, often creating panic among the unseasoned troops. Within a few days, the Germans had outmaneuvered France’s defenses and plunged deep into French territory.
Churchill takes office
After having demanded for almost a decade that Great Britain stand up to Germany, Winston Churchill had gained credibility among the British public with every aggressive move the Germans made. His rousing and combative speeches contrasted sharply with Chamberlain’s now thoroughly discredited promises of peace. When the British declared war in September 1939, Churchill had once again been brought into the government in the position he had served during World War I: First Lord of the Admiralty, the commander of Britain’s powerful navy.
By the time of the German offensive in May 1940, political turmoil afflicted both France and England. French leadership was in complete disarray as the Germans launched their offensive. Britain’s situation was little better. In early May, after Britain’s unsuccessful attempt to defend Norway from German troops, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the architect behind the 1930s policy of appeasement, was forced to step down. On May 10, even as the German offensive began, with public fear mounting every hour, Winston Churchill took his place.
The BEF at risk
Britain’s troops in France were officially designated the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), but in fact they amounted to virtually the whole of Britain’s army. On May 16, the BEF’s commanding general, Lord Gort, was stunned to learn that the Germans had broken through the French defenses west of the Ardennes the day before. On May 19, Gort warned Churchill and the British government that the BEF ran a grave risk of being caught between two German pincers: the force that had broken through the Ardennes, to the south, and the force that was still fighting its way across northern Belgium. For the first time, Gort explicitly included evacuation of the BEF as among the possible options.
Having been previously ill-informed of events in France, Churchill was shocked. The BEF was there to fight, not run away. Yet the next day, May 20, the panzers south of the BEF reached Abbeville, on the English Channel. The BEF was now cut off. Only gradually over the next week did the British government finally recognize what Lord Gort had known for some time. The French could not be counted on even for a staged and orderly strategic withdrawal, much less for stiff resistance. Hemmed in on three sides, Lord Gort faced a choice: try to break out through enemy lines to the south, or withdraw to the coast and hope for a miracle. On May 25 Gort decided to send units northward, to help the retreating Belgians long enough to give the BEF a chance to make it to the coast.
Gort was aided in this plan by a German mistake, one that would turn out to have primary importance in preventing a complete German victory in Europe. Worried that his panzers had overextended their supply lines, and concerned as well that they might get bogged down in marshy coastal terrain, on May 24 Hitler had ordered the tank divisions closing in on the BEF from the west to halt. The halt line was just west of the only remaining port from which the BEF might hope to get some its soldiers evacuated, the seaside resort town of Dunkirk.
“BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS AND SWEAT”
On May 13, three days after taking office as prime minister, Churchill addressed the House of Commons. His speech, he warned, would be short. “I have nothing to offer,” Churchill declared, “but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He continued: “We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny.... You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival” (Churchill in Gilbert, p. 333).
Dunkirk
Lasting only two days, Hitler’s halt order nonetheless allowed the BEF crucial time to set up a strong perimeter defense around Dunkirk. With the British force were substantial numbers of French troops and smaller numbers of Belgians. These defenders would be aided by several large canals that crisscrossed the area around the town. Since May 20, the British had been gathering ships to aid a possible partial evacuation, which was code-named “Operation Dynamo.” On the afternoon of Sunday, May 26, with no one predicting that it might last more than a day or two, Operation Dynamo commenced. The government hoped to rescue “up to 45,000 men” of the 250,000-strong BEF over two days, after which, they believed, “it is probable that the evacuation will be terminated by enemy action” (Gelb, p. 147). On this surviving remnant of the British army, along with their navy and air force, the British pinned their hopes of repelling the German invasion of their homeland expected after the fall of France.
During the first two days, May 26 and 27, only 8,000 soldiers were taken from the harbor at the town of Dunkirk and from the beaches around it. Most of the soldiers had not yet reached the coast itself, still being engaged in an orderly withdrawal from the perimeter. Also, only smaller vessels such as ferries, barges, and supply boats had been organized for the effort. From the first day, both the ships and the defenders were subjected to frequent bombing and strafing attacks by Stukas and German Messerschmitt fighter planes. Aside from getting the men to the sea, the British also had to find a way to protect them once they were there, and then to load them onto the ships and get the vessels back to England before the Germans managed to blow them out of the water.
By the third day, large numbers of men had made it out of Dunkirk’s harbor, and the British Royal Navy had brought in destroyers that could transport greater numbers of men. Small craft—such as pleasure or fishing boats—had also been commandeered to lift men off the beaches and ferry them out to larger ships off shore. That day, 19,000 men were rescued. On the fourth day, May 29, the number taken off was 47,000, particularly impressive because in the early morning two destroyers, with 1,500 men on board between them, were torpedoed and sunk. On the fifth day, 54,000 men were evacuated; on the sixth day, May 31, 68,000. By then, most of the BEF—almost 200,000 men—had been rescued.
The last few days of the operation saw thousands of French soldiers, comprising the rearguard of the perimeter defense, evacuated as well. Newspapers had the story by then, and the operation was already being heralded as a miracle. When Operation Dynamo closed down after ten days on June 4, 337,000 Allied soldiers had been rescued from death or capture—nearly 225,000 British, almost the whole of the BEF, along with 110,000 French. The British had lost perhaps 30,000 men killed or taken prisoner, along with valuable equipment such as trucks and guns. But they had saved their army.
The Speech in Focus
The contents
Churchill delivered his speech on the events at Dunkirk to the British House of Commons on June 4, 1940, beginning at 3:40 p.m. and ending at 4:15. He began by summarizing the German invasion of Belgium and France. A week ago, he confessed, he and many others had feared that only 20,000 or 30,000 soldiers might be saved. Nearly the entire British army seemed about to be captured, leaving the country in a dangerous position with regard to the rest of the war. Yet now a “miracle of deliverance” had been achieved (Churchill, “Speech on the Evacuation at Dunkirk,” p. 775). The retreating British and French troops had “hurled back” the enemy so violently that “he [the enemy] did not hurry their [the British and French troops’] departure seriously” (“Speech on the Evacuation,” p. 775). The Royal Air Force (RAF) had shot down four German planes for every British plane lost, and the Royal Navy, in over a thousand ships and boats of all kinds, had carried to safety over ten times the number of men originally thought possible.
Churchill warned that the British “must be careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations” (“Speech on the Evacuation,” p. 776). Yet a victory was indeed won during this time, one that Churchill felt had been underrated—a victory in the skies, as the RAF protected the troops from German attack. Despite being outnumbered and far from their home bases, the British fighter pilots drove off the German fighters and bombers. Churchill compared them with the Crusaders and King Arthur’s mythical Knights of the Round Table. Discussing the army, he noted that while the men were saved, almost all of the army’s equipment was left behind in France. Britain should be thankful at the army’s return, yet understand that the country has still suffered “colossal military disaster” (“Speech on the Evacuation,” p. 778).
From the recent past, Churchill then turned to the near future, warning that the possibility of a German invasion of Britain must now be taken seriously. Defenses must be organized, spies must be guarded against, and, above all, the British public must have confidence in the strength of their navy and air force to defend their island. Churchill reminded his listeners that tyrants (such as Napoleon) had threatened Britain from the continent in the past and had been defeated. Now, despite all the elements weighing against Britain, the country could go on fighting “if necessary for years, if necessary alone” (“Speech on the Evacuation,” p. 779).
Having built to a climax, Churchill then delivered one of the best-known concluding statements of any speech in modern times:
Even though 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, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight in 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.
(“Speech on the Evacuation,” pp. 779-80)
Churchill’s rhetoric of determination
Churchill declares in his speech that Britain will not “flag or fail” in the face of Nazi tyranny, no matter what has befallen its Allies. Throughout the 1930s, Churchill himself did not “flag or fail” in his staunch opposition to Hitler and to Nazi rule in Germany. For the entire decade, as Britain’s rulers pursued their policy of appeasement, the British public was often impatient with Churchill’s thundering and highly rhetorical denunciations of fascism. Over and over, he depicted the course of recent international politics as a confrontation not just between democracy and tyranny, but also between good and evil. Later, when events seemed to have borne his opinions out and the public mood had shifted in his favor, his clear and absolute conviction of where the good lay—firmly on the side of Britain and democracy—lent great depth to his determination that no matter what happened, Britain would never give up.
To his many political enemies, Churchill’s dramatic speeches were generally (in the words of publisher Sir Ernest Benn) little more than “flagwagging and epigramming” (Benn in Gilbert, p. 47). Citing “his impulsive imagination,” others worried that he was too easily carried away by the passion of the moment to steer his country safely through such perilous times (Gilbert, p. 47). Some accused him of arousing the emotions of his audience at the expense of restraint and wisdom in government policy.
Yet his rhetorical expertise was, in Churchill’s own eyes, a valuable tool, one that might help him lead his nation through perhaps the most dangerous and fearful time in its entire history. Britain’s position at the outbreak of war was very weak, and after Dunkirk it was weaker still. With France collapsing, Britain now stood alone in Europe against the Nazi threat. The United States was doing little. Popular opinion in the United States kept President Franklin D. Roosevelt from adopting any stand other than strict neutrality, at least for the moment. Possessing few material advantages, Britain had little to rely on but simple fighting spirit and its once-glorious military history.
During the climax of the speech, one observer recorded, Churchill covered the microphone with his hand and said, “And we will hit them over the head with beer bottles, which is all we have really got” (Churchill in Peterson, p. 780). It was not much of an exaggeration, considering their depleted resources. Churchill’s stunningly effective rhetoric was making the most of the most powerful weapon available—simple determination.
Sources
Churchill possessed an extensive body of knowledge based on his own wide readings in history and often used this awareness of the past to give himself and his fellow Britons confidence in their own future as a nation. “We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles,” he said, for example, near the middle of the speech.
This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone, “There are bitter weeds in England.” There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.
(“Speech on the Evacuation,” p. 778)
Along with references to Napoleon, Churchill also invoked past heroic figures (such as the Knights of the Round Table) in order to lend a romantic aura to the efforts he was now demanding from his countrymen.
Aside from these general literary sources, Churchill’s main sources for this speech were the reports he received from his commanders in France, especially the BEF commander general Lord Gort. He also received information from Britain’s navy and air force—the latter proving not entirely reliable. Churchill’s assertions, for example, that British pilots had shot down German planes at a rate of four-to-one were based on highly exaggerated RAF claims. Churchill was eager to keep morale high in the air force, knowing that air defense would play a key role in the months to come.
Reception
The response to the speech on the floor of the House was uniformly positive. “My dear Winston,” one member wrote to Churchill, “that was worth 1,000 guns & the speeches of 1,000 years” (Gilbert, p. 468). It was said that even several Labour members cried (Labour Party politicians were staunch opponents of Churchill). Among the public, where the speech was widely reported in the press, the noted literary figure Vita Sackville-West admitted that the speech “sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine. I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress” (Sackville-West in Gilbert, p. 469).
As the end of the speech makes clear, Churchill intended not only to raise British morale but also to soften the isolationist stance of the American public. He had entered into private correspondence with President Roosevelt soon after becoming head of the admiralty again in 1939, and had often asked Roosevelt privately for aid against the Germans. The speech after Dunkirk was the first time he had ever publicly expressed a hope for such aid from the Americans. Churchill’s speech also received wide publicity in the United States. (It was recorded for broadcast by an actor who imitated Churchill’s delivery, since Churchill himself was too busy to read it again.) Roosevelt gave a speech shortly afterward in which he promised “full speed ahead” in offering aid to those fighting against the Nazis (Kimball, p. 42). It would be almost a year, however, before Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, through which Britain was offered surplus U.S. military equipment.
For More Information
Carse, Robert. Dunkirk 1940. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Churchill, Winston. “Speech on the Evacuation at Dunkirk.” In Great Speeches. Edited by Houston Peterson. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.
Gelb, Norman. Dunkirk. New York: William Morrow, 1989.
Gilbert, Martin. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. 6: Finest Hour, 1939-41. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
Keegan, John. The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1989.
Kimball, Warren F. Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence. Vol. 1. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Peterson, Houston, ed. Great Speeches. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.