Otherwise known as the "Finest Hour" speech, it is Churchill telling the government and the British Empire that even though they have just experienced one of the most crushing defeats in modern history, tempered only by the miracle of Dunkirk, that the war will go on. This was perhaps the nadir of Britain's fortunes in the war. What was left of her army had no weapons, and no way of immediately replacing them. The Royal Navy, no longer as dominant as it had been in 1914, was face with the prospect of covering not only areas originally envisionaged but now having to extend its strained resources to protect the Mediterranean sea lanes which France had promised to protect. The RAF, though concentrated on British isles, was preparing to face off against the Luftwaffe which outnumbered it nearly 3 to 1. The Soviet Union was abiding by its Non-Agression Pact with the Nazis and the United States was keeping its head firmly buried in the sand, hoping that the war would not cross the ocean.
He could have mentioned that the situation was the result of the policies of the British and French governments for the previous decades. He does not. He could have trumpted his own horn, since he had been almost alone in predicting what Hitler's true intensions were. He did not. Instead he simply, clearly, concisley states what the new policy will be, and why it will work.
In this speech, Churchill laid out exactly what the penalty was for failing to stand up to the Nazi menace, now only tens of miles away across the English Channel. The decision was simple: to either fight the Nazi foe and win or to see the world"sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."
People do not talk like this anymore.
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