On 4 June 1940, as the last British and other Allied forces were evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, Winston Churchill gave what would become one of the best-known speeches of the 20th century. Addressing the House of Commons, the newly installed prime minister warned of the sacrifice that would likely soon be needed to deter the imminent threat of invasion by the most powerful armed forces ever assembled.
‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,’ he said defiantly. ‘We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…’ (As he sat down, he supposedly quietly remarked to a fellow MP: ‘And we’ll fight them with the butt ends of broken beer bottles because that’s bloody well all we’ve got!’)
It wasn’t the first time, of course, that Britain had faced invasion. With his unique ‘feel’ for history, Churchill was well aware of earlier ‘scares’ – especially those of the Napoleonic Wars, which in many respects paralleled that of 1940. As a new film opens in cinemas depicting Napoleon’s meteoric rise to power, we compare the two crises, which could so easily have ended in actual invasions. After all, as Churchill said in 1948, ‘Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’
