Finest hour

(2nd of two)

Most of the country was ready to throw in the towel. Pressure to do a deal with Nazi Germany must have been enormous. A safe answer to the question of whether to continue fighting the Nazis did not exist. Either way they faced suffering, and the people were scared - for good reason.

But Winston Churchill inspired a whole country with his "Finest Hour" speech, one of the bravest, most inspiring ever:

"What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over … the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. 

"If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

"But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 

"Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”