On 10 November 1942, in the wake of El Alamein, Britain’s first major victory of the war, Winston Churchill gave what would become one of his best-known speeches. ‘Now this is not the end,’ he told an audience in London. ‘It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ That quote may have become overused in subsequent decades – but it remains an important marker of how the tide of World War II was finally beginning to change.
It should be remembered that at the same time as Churchill uttered those words, the Red Army was crushing the Germans at Stalingrad, in the crucial battle for the Eastern Front. For in our fascination with Normandy 1944, it is often forgotten that without those seismic events two years earlier in the east, the ‘Second Front’ (as the invasion of France was known) and, ultimately, the toppling of the Third Reich may never have happened.
For another piece of the jigsaw, we need to look to the Trident Conference, attended by Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., in May 1943, as it firmly set the agenda for an invasion of France the following year. From that moment on, Britain and the US would be utterly focused on the death blow that Operation Overlord (the codename for the Allied invasion of Europe) was meant to be.
Greater London: Excavating the CA archive