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"It is but twenty years since these neighbors of ours fought almost the whole world and almost defeated them. Now they are rearming with the utmost speed. And ready to their hands is this new lamentable weapon of the air against which a navy has no defense and before which women and children, the weak and the frail, the pacifist and the jingo, the warrior and the civilian, the frontline trenches and the cottage home all lie in equal peril. Nay, worse still, for with the new weapon has come a new method or has come back the most brutish method of ancient barbarism—the possibility of compelling the submission of races by torturing their civil population. And worst of all, the more civilized the country is, the larger, more splendid its cities, the more intricate the structure of its social and economic life."

*  *  *

Churchill speaks of Adolf Hitler's Germany.

The strongman's Nazi Party grew from a fringe Bavarian group to national power between 1920 and now. British intelligence estimates the dictator's private army of "storm troopers" numbers more than four hundred thousand. These thugs can be seen roaming the streets of Berlin, beating and whipping anyone suspected of being anti-Nazi. At the sight of Adolf—and no one ever calls him that—these excitable gangs raise their right arms in salute, bellowing "Heil Hitler."

The Nazi leader's response is a simple lifting of his palm in acceptance, a Caesar, his power assured.

As Churchill speaks on the radio tonight, it is just three months since the death of Germany's elected president, eighty-six-year-old Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler, who had served as chancellor, quickly seized control, forming an all-powerful dictatorship. He is not the president, nor the chancellor, but the omnipotent Führer und Reichskanzler des Deutschen Volkes—"leader and reich chancellor of the German people."

Or just führer.

Winston Churchill has followed Hitler's violent ascent from a distance. He even attempted to meet the führer during a recent visit to Germany but was denied. Hitler saw no sense in spending time with a man possessing no political power. Now Churchill's personal mission includes keeping careful track of Germany's illegal military buildup, and even constructing a network of informants to spy on the Nazi war machine. In this way, he often shocks the House of Commons by presenting outrageous but true statistics about the growing threat. These figures, which many members of Parliament refuse to believe, are not designed to lead Britain into war, but to build the defenses necessary to protect his nation when war arrives. "To urge the preparation of defense is not to assert the imminence of war," he will tell Parliament on November 28. "On the contrary, if war were imminent, preparations for defense would be too late."

Churchill well knows Adolf Hitler's twisted plans include more than just conquest: All enemies of the German government are being rooted out—lawyers, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, and Jews. Hitler reserves his greatest hatred for all things Jewish, a people he blames for the nation's Great War defeat.

To the citizens of Germany, Hitler makes that outrageous claim, building rabid national sentiment against the very existence of Jewish people so he might one day succeed in their extermination. Already, a concentration camp known as Dachau, devoted to the torture, prosecution, and execution of Jews and political prisoners, opened outside Munich in 1933.

But to the people of Great Britain, Adolf Hitler tells a very different lie: Germany does not want war with Europe. She is a buffer state, protecting the continent against the Soviet Union and the spread of global Communism.

And England believes it. 

The British like Hitler.

A lot.

Winston Churchill now asks the nation to wake up and confront reality: "These are facts. Hard, grim, indisputable facts, and in face of these facts, I ask again:

"What are we to do?"

*  *  *

"I have come to the conclusion—reluctantly I admit—that we cannot get away. Here we are. We must make the best of it, but do not, I beg you, underrate the risks, the grievous risks, we have to run. I hope, I pray, and on the whole, grasping the larger hope, I believe that no war will fall upon us. But if in the near future the Great War of 1914 is resumed again in Europe after the armistice, for that is what it may come to under different conditions, in different combinations no doubt, if that should happen no one can tell where and how it would end. Or whether sooner or later we should not be dragged into it, as the USA was dragged in against their will in 1917. Whatever happened, and whatever we did, it would be a time of frightful danger for us.