Today's Reading
I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through...
The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.... If the conscience of the young men should ever come to feel, with regard to this one instrument, that it is evil and should go, the thing will be done...
Well, as I say, the future is in their hands. But when the next war comes, and European civilization is wiped out, as it will be, and by no force more than that force, then do not let them lay blame on the old men. Let them remember that they, principally, or they alone, are responsible for the terrors that have fallen upon the earth.
—BRITISH PRIME MINISTER STANLEY BALDWIN, NOVEMBER 10, 1932
PROLOGUE
WINSTON CHURCHILL
NOVEMBER 16, 1934
LONDON, ENGLAND
10 P.M.
Winston Churchill obsesses about Adolf Hitler. Even if the rest of civilization does not.
The parliamentary gadfly sits before a new British Broadcasting Corporation Type A microphone. Friday night. Pages of typewritten speech arranged in a neat pile on the small, angled desk before him. Rain pattering out on Portland Place. Brick walls absorb the rumble of Bakerloo line Underground trains one hundred feet below. Churchill removes the cigar from the corner of his mouth. Draws a breath, focuses on the first sentence.
Cries wolf.
"I have but a short time to deal with this enormous subject. I beg you therefore to weigh my words with the attention and thought which I have given them," the fifty-nine-year-old implores the people of Britain. Breath of Hine's brandy, Stilton cheese, the Cuban.
Churchill's career is in reverse. Once the holder of high offices in the government, the politician is now a figure of scorn and ridicule. His jeremiad is unpopular and out of touch with Britain's anti-war sentiment. This makes him only more determined that his message must be heard.
"It is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home. For nearly one thousand years England has never seen the campfires of an invader. Stormy seas and our Royal Navy have been our sure defense... It is indeed with a pang of stabbing pain that we see all this in mortal danger. A thousand years has been spent to form a state—an hour may lay it in the dust.
"What shall we do?"
* * *
"Causes of War" is the theme of this evening's broadcast, part of a series featuring prominent English thinkers. The first two speakers treated their discourse as an intellectual exercise, fawning over their topic with minutiae about arms manufacturing and flawed treaties. Their focus was a hypothetical conflict, war in the abstract.
But Churchill does not think another great war in Europe might happen—he is convinced it will happen. And now is the time to prepare.
"Only a few hours away by air there dwells a nation of nearly seventy million of the most educated, industrious, scientific people in the world, who are being taught from childhood to think of war as a glorious exercise and death in battle as the noblest deed for man. There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties in order to augment its collective strength. There is a nation which with all its strength and virtue is in the grip of a group of ruthless men preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride unrestrained by law, by Parliament, or by public opinion. In that country, all pacifist speeches, all morbid books, are forbidden or suppressed and the authors rigorously imprisoned.
"From their new table of commandments they have omitted: Thou shalt not kill."
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