Flashback, May 1926: General Strike Paralyzes Great Britain

A century ago this month, more than two million British workers walked off their jobs, either miners or unions in solidarity with them, over conditions already desperate and dangerous underground and only worsened by mine owners and the Conservative government. 

After nine days, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was forced to call off the General Strike, yielding their demands but not bitterness over what one striker called “the boil that needed lancing.”

I first became aware of this tumultuous event in British labor history while reading the first volume of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, often considered the second most powerful figure in His Majesty’s government, Churchill was heavily responsible for hardening opposition to the TUC in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and, once the work stoppage began, mounting the government’s propaganda effort against it.

For the rest of his career, union workers and their sympathizers did not regard this as Churchill’s finest hour, to say the least. In the immediate aftermath, for instance, an editorial in the progressive political and cultural magazine The New Statesman was titled, “Should We Hang Mr. Churchill or Not?”

What animated Churchill and other Conservatives in Baldwin’s Cabinet was a British equivalent of the Russian Revolution of nine years before. They feared the tumult similar to that resulting from the Bolshevik takeover: property owners dispossessed, churches closed, the royal family executed, and even the overthrow of the new, more liberal government of Alexander Kerensky.

Britain represented an even more tempting target for Communists bent on international expansion. Churchill had engaged in a poorly planned, unsuccessful 1919 Allied effort to invade Russia to, as he put it, “strangle Bolshevism at its birth," but he was determined not to allow chaos to metastasize at home.

Mining was a particular pressure point for British employment and the economy. With coal required to fuel the ships, power stations, coke ovens, home use and industry to make munitions, the government nationalized the industry during World War I. After the armistice, the Mine workers union wanted to keep the 18.5% wage increase they won during the conflict.

But in March 1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George returned the mines to private owners. By spring 1926, they had locked one million of their employees—a tenth of the British male workforce—out of their workplaces, demanding longer hours but less money.

Even many of the Conservatives in Parliament and Baldwin’s Cabinet felt that the mine owners dealt unjustly with the workers; it’s just that they feared the Marxist bogeyman more.

In the latest issue of the British publication The Literary Review, Richard Vinen explained why another issue—safety—only added to workers’ grievances:

“About a thousand a year died in accidents. Of the three most important leaders of the miners in 1926, two had lost their fathers in accidents underground. There were many injuries. [Historian Jonathan] Schneer cites the case of Thomas Baker of Sheffield, who received ten shillings a week as compensation for having lost a leg at the age of seventeen….The life of a miner was unimaginable to most people. Driving trains or buses might, for a time, seem amusing – which is why so many young men volunteered to do it in 1926. No one would have volunteered to be a miner, which is why men had to be conscripted to dig coal during the Second World War.”

Altogether it was, according to the late Welsh actor and film producer Stanley Baker, whose father lost a leg in a cave-in, “a place where death and poverty are daily threats.”

In back of it all was the restoration of the gold standard that Churchill pushed through in 1925. The result, explains Lawrence Reed, writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, in June 2023, was “a series of destructive results. British export industries suffered hugely, especially coal, leading to strikes and slowdowns.” John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of just this eventuality, in The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, went unheeded.

As the miners union felt increasingly pushed towards striking, they were joined by workers from other sectors walking out in sympathy, including transport and dock employees, as well as those employed in gas and electricity, printing, iron, steel and chemical jobs.

But the owners and the government were making their own preparations months in advance to stave off what Baldwin called “the road to anarchy and ruin.” A nine-month subsidy to owners to keep wages stable gave him time to:

* coordinate food and fuel availability through the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies;

* use the Emergency Powers Act of 1920 to issue regulations maintaining order; and

* establish a commission headed by Sir Herbert Samuel, which issued a report that, though critical of the mine owners, also recommended the reduction of miners’ wages.

Central to the effort, exactly where he wanted to be, was Churchill, who throughout the strike edited a four-page daily newspaper, the British Gazette. A blatant tool of government propaganda, it falsely assailed the TUC for attacking the constitution and threatening order while simultaneously jeering that the effort was for nought.

More crucial, Baldwin had also mobilized the army and volunteers to protect transportation services. Many volunteers who assumed the strikers’ roles may have felt they were engaging in what the American philosopher William James called “the moral equivalent of war”—the discipline engendered by armed conflict. Keeping Britain functioning called for reserves of idealism that the past brutal conflict had vastly reduced.

Considering the bitter emotions involved, it was surprising that casualties were comparatively limited during the strike: 41 people treated for injuries at the hands of baton-wielding mounted police. But it would be a mistake to say there was no damage.

Several train crashes occurred, with nonprofessional drivers—volunteers to fill vacancies left by those out in sympathy with the strikers—at the helm. One such accident at the Edinburgh Waverley station—a train hitting wagons in the tunnel—left three people dead.

Though Baldwin called for no reprisals—and the General Strike was over in little more than a week, with no concessions won by the strikers—the miners whose desperate plight sparked this epic owner-union capitalist tried to tough it out for another half year, when they were forced to yield to their bosses’ implacable demand: longer hours, less pay.

The hard heel on their necks was reinforced by government action in 1927 in the form of the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, which outlawed sympathy strikes—legislation so seemingly successful that to this day, Britain has experienced no other general strike. 

By 1928, TUC membership had plummeted to half a million, and to maintain future electoral viability, the Labour Party felt forced—at least for a while—to moderate its more militant elements.

It took more than a decade, but British sympathy for the strikers increased markedly by the end of World War II, as reflected in the books (and film adaptations) The Stars Look Down by A.J. Cronin and How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Ireland Affected ‘The Vital Strings of British Life and Politics’)

“Great Empires have been overturned. The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world, but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world. That says a lot for the persistency with which Irish men on the one side or the other are able to pursue their controversies. It says a great deal for the power which Ireland has, both Nationalist and Orange, to lay their hands upon the vital strings of British life and politics, and to hold, dominate, and convulse, year after year, generation after generation, the politics of this powerful country.” —Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), then Britain’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, “House of Commons Speech on the Ireland Situation,” Feb. 16, 1922

For those of us of Irish descent, St. Patrick’s Day should be not only for celebration but for remembrance of trauma, struggle, and resilience.  

With all due respect to the poet W.H. Auden when writing his great tribute to William Butler Yeats, it wasn’t simply the case that “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” It was Great Britain that had made Ireland mad in the first place. Among others who forgot this was Winston Churchill.

As long as freedom exists, he will be remembered for rallying Britain against the Nazi menace. His skill as a wordsmith is evident even in this short passage above.

But his not inconsiderable blind spot was arch-imperialism, and it shows here by what he doesn’t mention. British politics and government had been affected through much of his lifetime not so much by quarreling Nationalist and Orange factions in Ireland, as he suggests, but by that government’s fatal decision in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to sponsor plantations on the island, through land confiscated from Catholics and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland.

The most enduring of those plantations was in Ulster, the center of “Orange” opposition not just of independence but of home rule.

Moreover, for all the future Prime Minister’s worship of his father, it was Lord Randolph Churchill who had encouraged longstanding tensions between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland for blatantly political reasons.

When Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in the 1880s for Home Rule, Lord Churchill told a friend that long before he had decided if that came to pass, “the Orange card would be the one to play.” The prospect of armed Orange agreement to any grant of self-determination bothered him little as well: “Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right.”

Arguing for the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, Churchill may have felt he was removing the Irish question from British politics once and for all.

It turned out to be anything but, because of issues related to gerrymandering and systematic discrimination of the Catholic minority in Ulster that neither the Liberal nor Conservative governments in which Churchill served as minister moved to alleviate them. 

Those issues lay at the heart of the civil-rights movement launched by Catholics in the late 1960s, sparking a predictable reaction from the descendants of Orange opponents of the prior centuries—and now (with the toxic presence of British troops added to the mix) the nearly three-decades “Troubles” were launched.

This Day in British History (Birth of Brendan Bracken, Diehard Churchill Ally)

Feb. 15, 1901— Brendan Bracken—a mysterious figure who, despite being three decades younger than Winston Churchill, became his closest friend and Minister for Information in his wartime Cabinet—was born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland.

A lanky, bespectacled redhead with charm and energy to spare, Bracken was hard to miss in any assembly. But, if people had no trouble picking him out, they had plenty in figuring him out. 

Who was he? Where did he come from? How had he become so indispensable to Churchill? Why was there a break in their relationship for five years before Bracken re-committed himself to his mentor in the latter’s darkest political hours?

For a long time during his rise in business and politics, even the last part of that first sentence above—about Bracken’s date and place of birth—would have been murky. 

The truth was that Bracken’s father, a well-to-do builder and member of the Fenian brotherhood that sought Irish independence, died when Brendan was three and that his stepfather years later was likewise of republican sympathy.

But by his teens, Bracken was acting so wildly that his mother packed him off to a Jesuit boarding school in Dublin and, when that effort to curb him failed, even further, to a similar institution in Australia.

At age 18, with Ireland plunged into its war of independence from Britain, Bracken was back in Dublin. He embraced his mother’s Unionist sympathies but not her Catholic faith. In the next several years, he not only rejected his Irish identity but bewildered former and newfound acquaintances by denying he had one, passing himself off as Australian. 

At various times, he also changed his age when the circumstances were advantageous and claimed that a brother had died when actually, like all family members except his mother, Bracken was estranged from him.

In 1923, the most important event in his life occurred when he met Winston Churchill. That December he organized Churchill’s unsuccessful General Election race as a Liberal in Leicester West, then another, four months later, as an independent. Finally by the end of 2024, Churchill won a safe seat in a return to the Conservative Party he had abandoned 20 years before.

An astonishing rumor, fed as much by the pair’s close relationship as by the red hair they shared, was that Bracken was his chief’s illegitimate child. The aide not only didn’t deny it but, some suspect, may have even spread the gossip. 

Churchill’s wife Clementine, already fuming that her husband's newfound friend was sleeping in the house with his feet up on the sofa, demanded answers, only to be blithely assured by the great man, “I looked it up, but the dates don’t coincide.”  

Though the rumor was untrue, it's hard not to think of the two men as surrogate family members. Bracken was more responsible, even-tempered and helpful than Churchill's choleric and alcoholic son Randolph. And in Churchill, Bracken found something of a father figure, an affectionate presence who fully shared his Unionist, even imperial, sympathies.

With Churchill’s return to the House of Commons, their paths diverged for a time, with Bracken displaying a talent for finance and business management. He became a publishing mogul, becoming chairman of the Financial News in 1928 and, 17 years later, merging it into The Financial Times, making that paper with its distinct paper color the institution it remains.

This business acumen and journalistic influence became indispensable to Churchill by the end of the decade, when this lifelong politician struggled through the decade known as his “Wilderness Years,” the period when, his relentless ambitions stymied, he was without a Cabinet post, a mere back-bencher.

In 1929, having won election as a Conservative in the North Paddington seat, Bracken allied himself again with Churchill, becoming for the next 10 years a foul-weather friend who stood by him in his lowest political and financial moments.

It was bad enough that Churchill found himself out of step with Conservative leadership on Indian policy, King Edward VIII’s abdication crisis, and appeasement towards Nazi Germany. But his spendthrift habits put him continually in financial danger.

In 1938, press baron Max Beaverbook, disapproving of Churchill’s increasingly dire warnings about Adolf Hitler’s rearmament campaign, terminated his contract for writing an Evening Standard column. 

Without this desperately needed source of funds, a despondent Churchill made plans to sell Chartwell, the home into which he had poured so much of his money.

It was Bracken who came to his rescue by having his associate Sir Henry Strakosch buy Churchill’s American stocks at their original purchase price and pay him interest to boot.

Strakosch performed similar financial magic in 1940, as Churchill moved to the forefront of the movement to fight the Nazi war machine no matter the cost.

Had these arrangements been revealed at the time, they might have opened Churchill up to attempts to discredit his wartime efforts—as indeed has happened now from the American far right, with Darryl Cooper labeling Churchill “the “chief villain of the Second World War” in an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson.

Bracken was as instrumental in ensuring that Churchill finally became Prime Minister as he had been in keeping him from declaring bankruptcy. 

With Neville Chamberlain’s leadership fatally undermined by a closer-than-expected no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, Churchill told Bracken he was willing to serve under Chamberlain’s desired successor, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. 

Bracken got his friend to remain silent in the high-level meetings if Halifax were proposed to lead the new government. In the end, Halifax, saying it would be difficult to lead the war effort as a House of Lords member, left the field effectively open to Churchill.

In 1941, Churchill named Bracken his Minister of Information—in effect, in charge of wartime propaganda. Two authors distinctly unimpressed by what they learned about Bracken at close range in the war obliquely targeted him in their novels.

Evelyn Waugh told future biographer Christopher Sykes that Brideshead Revisited’s Rex Mottram was his only character fully drawn from life. Though he tried to disguise the source by making Mottram a Canadian, other details—notably, the character’s colonial origins, opportunism, overwhelming business success, and lack of devotion or even interest in Catholicism—pointed towards Bracken. 

And George Orwell was so incensed by the restrictions under which he labored in Bracken’s Ministry of Information, it was said, that he was inspired to create Big Brother in 1984, with the character’s kinship with the politico hinted at in their initials: B.B.

Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 General Election—in a campaign not helped by Bracken’s advocacy of an overly negative, partisan tone—left the two men out of power.

When Churchill returned to Downing Street six years later, Bracken announced that ill health precluded his continuation in politics. But he was not done serving his mentor and hero.

In June 1953, Bracken joined the Prime Minister’s inner circle in covering up the news of Churchill’s massive stroke, claiming only that the leader required “complete rest” for a while, ensuring that there would be no accurate UK coverage of the problem. 

It wasn’t until a year passed that Churchill, having made a great recovery in the meantime, gave even a hint of his health crisis.

By this time, the health of Bracken himself, a lifelong chain smoker, was in more serious danger. Upon hearing the news of the death of his stalwart friend in 1958 from lung cancer, Churchill lamented the loss of “poor, dear Brendan.”

Quote of the Day (Sir Winston Churchill, on ‘The Wicked’ and the Dictators)

“The wicked are not always clever, nor are dictators always right.”— British Prime Minister and Nobel Literature laureate Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), The Grand Alliance: The Second World War, Vol. 3 (1950)

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on ‘The Only Wise and Safe Course’)

“The only wise and safe course is to act from day to day in accordance with what one's own conscience seems to decree." — British Prime Minister and Nobel Literature laureate Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), The Gathering Storm (Volume One of “The Second World War”) (1948)

Quote of the Day (Sir Winston Churchill, on How ‘All the Great Things Are Simple’)

"All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope."— British Prime Minister and Nobel Literature laureate Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), “On a United Europe,” speech at the Albert Hall, London, UK, May 14, 1947

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on How Much Was ‘Owed by So Many to So Few’)

“The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers, who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain.”—British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), “The Few” speech to the House of Commons, Aug. 20, 1940

In his early days as Prime Minister, Winston Churchill was intent on preparing his countrymen for immense sacrifice and on rallying them against the Nazi menace. Eighty years ago today, he reported, in detail and with the stirring words above, on how courageous British airmen had withstood the most serious assault ordered by Adolf Hitler to date.

With France out of the way, Hitler turned his attention in earnest to Britain. Assured by his designated successor, Luftwaffe founder Hermann Goering, that German airforce could overpower British’s in five weeks, he belied that a massive aerial attack would soften Britain up for a knockout blow by land and sea forces. The Luftwaffe began by targeting southern England, but on August 13, 1940 switched to raining punishing blows on British airfields and radio stations.

By “so few,” Churchill could have been referring not just to the Royal Air Force (RAF) compared with the whole population of Great Britain but also to its significant disadvantage against the Luftwaffe. Hitler could call on 1,260 long-range bombers, 320 dive bombers, 280 twin-engine fighters, and 800 single-engine fighters, versus only 900 fighters for the RAF.

From July 10 to October 12—the duration of the Battle of Britain—the British public watched the skies, dreaded the bombs that would eventually come their way, and prayed for the young men rushing to their planes to save them. The first two months were particularly intense for the airmen, wrote Supermarine Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary in his memoir of the battle, The Last Enemy (1942):

“[W]e were always so outnumbered that it was practically impossible, unless we were lucky enough to have the advantage of height, to deliver more than one Squadron attack. After a few seconds we always broke up, and the sky was a smoke trail of individual dog-fights. The result was that the Squadron would come home individually, machines landing one after the other at intervals of about two minutes. After an hour, Uncle George would make a check-up on who was missing. Often there would be a telephone call from some pilot to say that he had made a forced landing at some other airdrome, or in a field. But the telephone wasn’t always so welcome. It would be a rescue squad announcing the number of a crashed machine; then Uncle George would check it, and cross another name off the list. At that time, the losing of pilots was somehow extremely impersonal; nobody, I think, felt any great emotion — there simply wasn’t time for it.”

Like its foe, the RAF sustained heavy losses. Dark days remained, including The Blitz that lasted from September through the following March. But, through a combination of cool-headed British military and political leadership and adept use of radar—and Nazi underestimation of their foe and lack of military intelligence—the RAF prevailed, of course.

The Website of the Churchill Society London labels the speech I’ve excerpted here “The Few.” No other label is necessary to identify its contents, so well-known is the sentence that makes it among the Prime Minister’s most quoted utterances.

That sentence is not just a masterly exercise in political rhetoric but also in effective English, demonstrating in microcosm why Churchill would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 13 years later. It employs to perfection parallel construction—a series of phrases held together by similar words, phrases or grammatical structure. That common element is the word “so,” followed by a set of quantities—with the first two suggesting immensity (“much” and “many”), but the last providing an unexpected contrast conveying paucity (“the few”).

Oh, yes, one last thing: Churchill had a large ego (“All men are worms, but I do believe that I am a glow-worm,” he observed waggishly). But he knew when to step aside and pay tribute to others without drawing undue attention to himself.

His audience—both members of the House of Commons and the larger world who read his words reported afterward—knew exactly who he meant by “the few,” and it did not include himself. (And that is part of the reason why I chose to use a photo of the brave airmen rather than the great statesman who honored them.)

Certain contemporary world leaders might take note of that—and keep in mind that, for his heartfelt acknowledgment of others, Churchill has still managed to be remembered well by posterity.

(I wrote this post while listening to the stirring soundtrack of the 1969 film, The Battle of Britain. Do yourself a favor: When you feel down-heartened by the drumbeat of infuriating news this days, play this YouTube clip of this uplifting music.)

This Day in WWII History (Churchill, de Gaulle Rally Demoralized Countrymen)

June 18, 1940—With France overrun and British forces only narrowly making it back across the English Channel, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle appealed to their beleaguered countrymen to continue the fight against their Nazi foes. 

Their inspirational speeches became an essential part of their legends. Churchill’s address to the House of Commons especially echoes to the present day with its ringing closing: “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.’” De Gaulle’s “Appeal of June 18” is still taught to French schoolchildren as the birth of the Resistance movement.

The British Prime Minister had been a fixture in his nation’s politics for the prior four decades, so his speech in the House of Commons was heard and absorbed immediately by the electorate. But the French general at this point was still relatively little-known, so his words were not recognized as the official kick-off of the Resistance until well into the war.

In recent weeks, statues of Churchill and de Gaulle have been defaced by vandals who decried their racist attitudes. To be sure, both men were imperialists who did not regard colonials (often non-white) as equal to their rulers.

Speaking before the Peel Commission in March 1937, Churchill said: "I do not admit that wrong has been done to these people [Native Americans and blacks in Australia] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put in that way, has come in and taken their place.” In 1959, while noting that the presence of Moslems testified to France’s tolerance, de Gaulle also warned against admitting them in mass numbers, scoffing: “Those who advocate integration have the brain of a hummingbird.”

But both acknowledged frankly that the survival of their countries depended on colonies that could help sustain the fight against the Nazis. Moreover, for all their paternalism towards subject peoples, their battle against Nazism was the most important victory over racism in the 20^th century.

In addition to paternalism, Churchill and de Gaulle exhibited swollen egos. But for all their large and real faults, they are remembered rightly as heroes to their countrymen. The desperate situation they faced in June 1940 brought their leadership into sharp focus. It is worthwhile recalling the several ways in which this quality manifested itself:

*Patriotism. Advocacy of imperialism was the negative side of Churchill and de Gaulle’s abiding faith in Britain and France. The positive side was their belief in the best parts of their nation’s heritage. De Gaulle was careful to distinguish between patriotism and the nationalism that fueled the rise of Fascism: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

*Conservative, but not reactionary, politics. Churchill and de Gaulle were not only fierce anti-Communists but had little use for Socialism. But they refused to ally with the sizable far-right movements in their countries. Churchill spoke repeatedly throughout the 1930s against appeasement, which assured that he would remain without a leadership position among the Tories throughout the decade. A devout Roman Catholic, de Gaulle never became infected with the anti-Semitism displayed by so many French co-religionists in the wake of the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s. Unlike many in the French military, though de Gaulle scorned most politicians, he accepted the legitimacy of the French republic itself. As David Bell noted in a 2018 article in The Nation, he “never embraced the viciously intolerant reactionary nationalism so common among monarchists on the prewar French right.”

*Realism about their nations’ dire crises. Particularly in the case of Churchill, admirers have pointed to the hope the two leaders provided when little appeared on the horizon. But—unlike current leaders on both sides of the Atlantic—that did not mean that they sugarcoated, let alone denied, the catastrophic losses their nations’ armed forces had just sustained, nor what could happen if they lost. The very first line of Churchill’s address spoke of “the disastrous military events which have happened during the past fortnight.” He went on to spell it out: “Our Army and 120,000 French troops were indeed rescued by the British Navy from Dunkirk but only with the loss of their cannon, vehicles and modern equipment. This loss inevitably took some weeks to repair, and in the first two of those weeks the battle in France has been lost.” Similarly, de Gaulle acknowledged in his London radio address: “It is quite true that we were, and still are, overwhelmed by enemy mechanized forces, both on the ground and in the air.” Later, during his political career, he observed, "Politics is nothing else than the art of realities."

*Identification of their countries’ real sources of continuing strength. These frank admissions of losses bolstered the credibility of Churchill and de Gaulle when they explained how they thought Britain and France would defeat Adolf Hitler in the end. Churchill cited the many troops that had escaped the Nazis’ trap in France, the million and a quarter men currently under arms in Britain, the logistical difficulties that would face the Nazis during a cross-channel invasion, the powerful Royal Navy, and the cooperation of the British Empire’s self-governing dominions: Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. De Gaulle pointed to the assistance of Great Britain, the support of France’s colonies, and the industrial strength of the United States.

*Calls for collective action. With the crises facing their country so utterly grave, neither Churchill nor de Gaulle was foolhardy enough to say, as one Western leader proclaimed several years ago, “I alone can fix it.” Churchill consulted with his generals and the self-governing dominions, who agreed the fight could be continued. De Gaulle summoned “all French officers and men who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future, with or without their arms,” as well as “all engineers and skilled workmen from the armaments factories who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future.”

*Refusal to compromise with evil. Influential voices in both Great Britain and France contemplated giving up the fight against the Nazis. In May 1940, two members of Churchill’s Cabinet, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax—who, before the outbreak of hostilities, had pursued appeasement of the Nazis—proposed negotiating peace with Hitler. Several weeks later, they had to be persuaded that De Gaulle, only recently promoted to Brigadier General, should be allowed to speak on the BBC for a Free France, rather than Marshal Henri Petain. (The latter would see the honor gained through his WWI service effaced by his leadership of the infamous Vichy collaborationist regime.)

*Refusal to break constitutional norms. Crises offer dictators the opportunity to seize total power. But unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, who exploited unrest in their countries to seize total power (or by current European and American leaders who have tried to do likewise), Churchill and de Gaulle continued to work, as far as possible, within the constitutional systems of Britain and France.

*Heightened eloquence. Churchill’s powers of rhetoric were such that he won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. De Gaulle’s eloquence is less well-known to Anglophones, but his vision of his country called out the most unexpectedly romantic sentences from this hard-headed general and politician. His War Memoirs begins with this famous paragraph: "All my life I have had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. Instinctively, I have the feeling that Providence has created her either for complete success or for exemplary misfortunes.” 

In calling fellow citizens to arms in their June 18 addresses, Churchill and de Gaulle marshalled the weapons immediately at hand to them: words that expressed truth--an appropriate response to a dictatorship that used propaganda to incite attacks on religious and racial minorities and to devastate an entire continent. 

De Gaulle invoked “the flame of the Resistance” against the enemy, while Churchill’s speech gave rise, in addition to “their finest hour,” this famous sentence that called for ending the hunt for scapegoats for Britain’s military calamity: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

De Gaulle’s arrogance and humorlessness alienated Franklin Roosevelt, and often he sorely tried the patience of Churchill. But in encountering de Gaulle for the first time in June 1940, the British leader was impressed by the lonely, courageous stance that this newly minted brigadier general and under secretary of state took as the only member of the French government willing to carry on the fight against Hitler from Great Britain. 

Churchill and de Gaulle may have been egocentric, stubborn and not always enlightened towards those who fell outside the whites they saw as integral to their countries' history and governance. But they also recognized in each other brilliance, fortitude and a sincere, steadfast devotion to their countries’ highest ideals—enough to sustain them through their subsequent stormy wartime partnership.