The Churchill Series – Dec. 8, 2006

(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)

Readers’ Note: The quantity of comments on this series is few but the quality is very high. I read every comment and thank you all for them. I plan to take a crack at answering one – why did Hitler turn on Russia before he finished with Britain? – in a week or so. I plan after the first of the year to answer another reader's question concerning particular subjects of Nazi propaganda related to Churchill. We can all guess one already: He was “a drunk.”

John
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Yesterday’s post quoted Churchill concerning “silly people” in the Axis countries and even in some Allied countries who believed after Pearl Harbor that America would not make a significant contribution to the war, and might even be a drag on Allied war efforts.

Churchill went on to refute those “silly people” and explain why, when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor, he knew “we had won.”

I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. Anerican blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey [,foreign secretary at the time of WW I,] had made to me more that thirty years before – that the United States is like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire if lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”

Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.

On December 12 Churchill secretly boarded the battleship HMS Duke of York to begin a journey to America where he’d meet with President Roosevelt for joint war planning.
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Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America. (pgs. 343-347)