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How Churchill Saw the Second World War as a Moral Conflict
- By JUSTIN D. LYONS
- | October 20, 2022
- Category: Explore Understanding Churchill
For ten years Churchill delivered a sustained, prophetic barrage against the policies of disarmament and appeasement. He believed them to be naïve, misguided, and ultimately productive of the very war they were designed to prevent. But the threat Churchill perceived was not merely geopolitical; it was a moral conflict.
Out of the void left by the collapse of Germany’s 1918-33 Weimar Republic emerged Adolf Hitler. Churchill’s assessment of Hitler’s moral character comes as no surprise: “…a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast.”1 Germany was in the grip of missionaries of pride, hatred, war, and conquest.
A moral conflict
Churchill’s prewar proclamations about the character of the Nazi regime are a preamble to his war-time rhetoric. He consistently described the Second World War as a moral conflict in which principle was at stake. It was a war to determine whether the principle of freedom could survive the onslaught of the forces of tyranny:
This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain: no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish on impregnable rocks the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.2
Hitler appealed to everything that is darkest in the human heart. Churchill himself appealed to different passions. He summoned the virtues of the British people and helped them find strength within themselves. He sought to elevate rather than to debase; to raise Britons from a desire for security above all to a contemplation of the just and the noble; to embolden them to face sacrifice and death rather than see the armies of evil pound their booted rhythms on the earth.
The storm breaks
The day Churchill became Prime Minister, Hitler sprang out at Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The Low Countries were conquered in three weeks. Six weeks later Paris had fallen, and France had asked for an armistice. Britain stood alone and could very shortly expect the wrath of the German war machine. But Churchill’s iron determination spread across the country through his soaring oratory.
Whence came his deep conviction to fight on? It was not simply the desire for self-preservation. To Churchill, Britain meant something to the world, something larger than itself: thus the moral conflict. He expressed these sentiments in his first broadcast, “in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our Empire, of our Allies, and, above all, of the cause of Freedom.” He warned that bitter trials lay ahead: “After this battle in France abates its force, there will come the battle for our Island—for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means.”3
Churchill believed that Britain’s fate might well determine whether freedom could survive anywhere: “Prepare yourselves, then, my friends and comrades…. We shall never turn from our purpose, however sombre the road, however grievous the cost, because we know that out of this time of trial and tribulation will be born a new freedom and glory for all mankind.”4 For Churchill the fate of Britain was tied up with the fate of the world.
“Let God defend the right”
As the Prime Minister predicted, the Luftwaffe launched a determined assault to establish air superiority over Britain. That secured, the way would be cleared for a sea-borne invasion. As this conflict raged on, Churchill continued to deliver messages of resolve and higher purpose:
And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant’s might and enmity can do, Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone, but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization… we await undismayed the impending assault.5
Unable to establish air superiority, Hitler ordered a turn from attacking RAF airfields and radar stations to the mass bombing of population centers, especially London. The Blitz (7 September 1940 – 11 May 1941) was meant to break British will and morale. As the sky rained fire, the choice seemed to be to die resisting or live submitting. They did not submit. Four days after the first bombs fell, Churchill again spoke of the moral conflict: “It is with devout but sure confidence that I say: Let God defend the Right.”6
Turning Points
The Second World War was long, arduous and bloody. At the beginning, with most of Western Europe in its hands, it looked as if Nazi Germany would win. Yet at the end, the Allies stood victorious over the Axis powers. Since then, historians have oft debated when the turning point came. Ironically, 1941, which saw Hitler sweep into Russia and Japan attack American, British and Dutch interests in the Pacific, also forged the grand alliance that would end in their defeat.
By late 1942, victories in Egypt, Russia and North Africa had begun to make the difference. Accordingly, Churchill entitled his fourth volume of Second World War memoirs, The Hinge of Fate. “In it,” he wrote, “we turn from almost uninterrupted disaster to almost unbroken success.”7
The true climacteric
A different turning point occurred in late May 1940, when Italy offered to broker an armistice. The War Cabinet was divided. Germany seemed invincible; 338,000 allied troops had evacuated Dunkirk. Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax favored the proposal. If Britain “found we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence,” he told the War Cabinet, “we would be foolish if we did not accept them.”8
Churchill’s response to the outer Cabinet brought his ministers to their feet and ended all talk of parley. His words, well known, are always worth remembering:
I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man. But it was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out…. We should become a slave state…. I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.9
This was the turning point of the moral conflict. The nation’s moral strength was irrevocable. All the subsequent successes, even victory, follow from this moment. Even if the material victories never came, the moral victory would still have been won.
Why Churchill fought on
It has been rightly pointed out that such intransigence might well lead to destruction:
The difference between perseverance and disastrous inflexibility can be terribly thin. England came within a hair’s breadth of losing the war and suffering the horrors of invasion and occupation by Nazi Germany. In that case, Churchill’s bulldog determination—his refusal to accept a relatively generous peace offer after the fall of France—would seem in retrospect the magnificent, if wrong-headed, defiance of a tragic figure who brought his people low by his own heroic intransigence.10
Churchill was prepared to accept that risk, but if Britain had fallen, his decision would not have been wrongheaded. In his own words, “You have to consider the character of the Nazi movement and the rule that it implies.”11 Peace with Hitler would have surrendered the whole of Europe, and perhaps the world, to soul-destroying tyranny; it would have betrayed every moral principle Britain stood for.
* * *
Churchill’s answer to those who question his intransigence is straightforward: “It is not given to the cleverest and most calculating of mortals to know with certainty their interest. Yet it is given to quite a lot of simple folk to know every day what is their duty.”12
Nor, to take up Halifax’s reasonable concerns, would Britain herself have been delivered by backing away from the war in 1940. Safety was never to be purchased in this fashion from the Nazis. Whatever terms might be offered, Hitler never kept his promises. Would the horrors of occupation by capitulation been any less than the horrors of occupation by invasion? Would Britons find enslavement easier to bear for having submitted to it voluntarily? Or, if offered, could they have consented to special status, while millions toiled and died under Hitler’s yoke? Truly, Britain’s only option in a moral conflict was resistance. Churchill understood that better than anybody.
The author
Justin D. Lyons, Associate Professor of Political Science at Cedarville University in Ohio, is author of “Churchill on Statesmanship: Pope Innocent XI”; “Churchill, Shakespeare and Agincourt”; “On War: Churchill, Thucydides, and the Teachable Moment”; and “Winston Churchill and Julius Caesar: Parallels and Inspirations.”
Further Reading
Justin D. Lyons, “Winston Churchill’s Moral and Philosophical Guides” (2021)
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 9.
2 WSC, “War,” 3 September 1939, in Robert Rhodes James, ed. Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Borker, 1974), VI: 6153.
3 WSC, “Arm Yourselves and Be Ye Men of Valour,” 19 May 1940, in Complete Speeches, VI: 6221-22.
4 WSC, “The ‘Grit and Stamina’ of London,” 14 July 1941, in Complete Speeches, VI: 6452.
5 WSC, “The War of the Unknown Warriors,” 14 July 1940 in Winston S. Churchill, ed., Never Give In! The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 235.
6 WSC, “These Cruel, Wanton, Indiscriminate Bombings of London,” 11 September 1940, Ibid., 252.
7 WSC, The Hinge of Fate, Vol. IV, The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), vi.
8 John Lukacs, Five Days in London, May 1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 117.
9 Quoted by Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare, Ibid., 4.
10 Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy: The Triumph of Vision in Leadership (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 258.
11 WSC, “A Total and Unmitigated Defeat” 5 October 1938 in Complete Speeches, VI: 6011.
12 WSC, “The Quebec Conference” August 31, 1943 in Complete Speeches, VII: 6822.
Successful leadership harnessed to morality.