Churchill first speech
Lukacs. In 1991, he wrote The Duel:
10 May–31 July 1940: The Eighty-Day
Struggle between Churchill and Hitler
(Ticknor and Fields). Eight years later, he published Five Days in London, May
1940 (Yale University Press, 1999). His latest offering focuses on then–prime minister Winston Churchill’s “Blood,
Toil, Tears and Sweat” speech, delivered in the House of Commons, or, as the author puts it even more narrowly,
“the subject of this book is one particular sentence said by one particular man on the 13th of May 1940” (10).
Lukacs singles out this particular speech for one main reason. In his view, the speech showed that Churchill fully understood what the West faced in a confrontation with Hitler’s Germany:
“It involved his conviction, his deepest one, that if the Western democracies were to give up fighting, if they were to seek an accommodation with Hitler, that it would be the end: the definite end not only of their independence, but of Western civilisation, forever” (53).
With such bleak rhetoric of required sacrifice and impending disaster, the speech set the tone for what Britain would face in the war. Lukacs also asserts that buried within this speech were two important elements: Churchill believed that the British people would prefer to know the worst and that they would rally around his appeal.
Lukacs’s claims regarding the importance of the speech are undercut somewhat by the fact that it was not broadcast by the BBC, nor was it widely read. He gets around this point by discussing some of Churchill’s other speeches from 1940 and describing the effects of those speeches as
“cumulative, not instant” (62). Also, he cites the BBC’s “Audience Research” to show that the British people tuned in to Churchill’s broadcasts in greater numbers as the summer of 1940 wore on, along with observations from a
Ministry of Information study showing that during the same period the British people began to become aware of the
10 May–31 July 1940: The Eighty-Day
Struggle between Churchill and Hitler
(Ticknor and Fields). Eight years later, he published Five Days in London, May
1940 (Yale University Press, 1999). His latest offering focuses on then–prime minister Winston Churchill’s “Blood,
Toil, Tears and Sweat” speech, delivered in the House of Commons, or, as the author puts it even more narrowly,
“the subject of this book is one particular sentence said by one particular man on the 13th of May 1940” (10).
Lukacs singles out this particular speech for one main reason. In his view, the speech showed that Churchill fully understood what the West faced in a confrontation with Hitler’s Germany:
“It involved his conviction, his deepest one, that if the Western democracies were to give up fighting, if they were to seek an accommodation with Hitler, that it would be the end: the definite end not only of their independence, but of Western civilisation, forever” (53).
With such bleak rhetoric of required sacrifice and impending disaster, the speech set the tone for what Britain would face in the war. Lukacs also asserts that buried within this speech were two important elements: Churchill believed that the British people would prefer to know the worst and that they would rally around his appeal.
Lukacs’s claims regarding the importance of the speech are undercut somewhat by the fact that it was not broadcast by the BBC, nor was it widely read. He gets around this point by discussing some of Churchill’s other speeches from 1940 and describing the effects of those speeches as
“cumulative, not instant” (62). Also, he cites the BBC’s “Audience Research” to show that the British people tuned in to Churchill’s broadcasts in greater numbers as the summer of 1940 wore on, along with observations from a
Ministry of Information study showing that during the same period the British people began to become aware of the